Help For The Confused Online Shoppers!
Saturday, July 19th, 2008Online retailers shudder at the thought of visitors leaving their website without buying anything. They would be surprised to know that most people that visit a website intending to buy a product give up only because of confusion. The navigation, product descriptions and checkout procedures leave them confused and frustrated. Many of us would have experienced this when shopping online and now there is help coming our way.
Some online retailers who realize this problem, started offering real-time chats with sales agents, but even these have not done much to help. The reason being, most visitors who are frustrated do not bother to click on chat-invitations. These chats also prove to be expensive to the retailer, because only a small percentage of visitors out of the hundreds that visit, are serious shoppers.
Smart retailers are beginning to understand the psyche of a shopper and have begun noticing their movements on the sly, targeting those visitors that are confused and are most likely to leave the website without buying. The retailers keep a check on people that keep jumping frequently between web pages that offer similar products, those that scroll up and down the page many times, those who linger or even people that re-read the description of the product that has already been placed in their shopping cart. These repetitive movements identify shoppers that are confused and are unable to decide on which product to buy. This is when the retailers intervene through chat and try to help them decide.
This is done with the help of a new service called the “confusion index” for online retailers, which is going to be out soon. This service will be more effective as more factors about a visitor are analyzed. The confusion index ranks the confusion of a visitor on a scale of 1 to 100 from mild confusion to utter confusion, based on their activities. The confusion ranking increases when a shopper fills a form slowly. Taking the example of a shopper planning on buying a laptop, the confusion ranking rises higher and faster, if the shopper hesitates before typing an answer to certain questions, such as the requirement of RAM and bus speed etc. This confusion index can reach much higher if the shopper is from Wyoming or Montana, the two U.S. states that are least computer-savvy. (more…)


