If I need to create an account to estimate my shipping costs, your store is broken
Understanding patterns of online shoppers
This was a tweet, but 140 characters didn’t quite satisfy me. I’m targeting this article to store owners who probably don’t understand the real meaning behind my rant.
I’m writing due to my recent shopping experience. I recently read an article on Business Insider, which talked about using the “Time Timer” to stay on track during meetings. I thought it was a pretty cool product, so I decided to buy it. Seeing as how the Amazon USA price listed was $23 and the lowest price on Amazon Canada was $42 with shipping, I told myself I’d look around and try to find it at a cheaper price. I usually don’t venture out of my normal stores and was extremely displeased with the state of many stores.
Shipping costs are part of shopping online. I get that, everyone gets that.
But, did you know it changes the final price?
Shoppers make their buying decision based on what it will cost them when it’s arrived at their door. If you’re selling something $25 with $15 shipping, I’m going to go with the one for $30 with $5 shipping, it’s not rocket science.
Unless your store is the only one in the world that has that specific item, new customers are not coming to specially shop at your store. They are coming based on the price at which you sell the item.
Look at the big picture, please.
Shoppers can compare prices from 10 stores in about 10 minutes, and that’s exactly what they do. They open all the potential stores as separate tabs and compare the prices one by one. If they can’t get an estimate for shipping upfront, they’ll close the tab and move on to the next store.
Why? Let me tell you why. I would have had to create new 10 accounts just to estimate my shipping costs for my Time Timer, only to end up using one store. Not only does that take time (no pun intended), but the information required is my full name, full address, phone number and email. Do you really expect people to hand out their information to 10 unknown stores? Before shoppers go on to the “Should I trust this store” phase, they need to complete the “Is this a price I want to pay for this product at my door” phase. It’s a double deterrent.
Even if they were to create an account just to estimate shipping and never come back again, what good does a ghost customer do in your database anyways? Possibly spam them with your newsletter, once? Maybe it’s to make yourself feel good with vanity metrics?
“Awesome! We have 200 new sign ups this month and they aren’t doing shit!”
Engaged customers buy things, not ghost ones. You’re simply losing sales to stores that allow shoppers to estimate shipping without an account.
For those of you who are wondering, I ended up going with the store that clearly indicated they had a flat (reasonable) shipping rate. ☺
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