Shipping Costs Are a Huge Factor in Your Customers’ Purchase Decision

Being presented with unexpected costs is the number one reason shoppers abandon their cart without completing their purchase. In a recent large-scale study conducted by comScore and UPS, they found that:

• 56% of shoppers agree that when they decide to check out, unexpected costs like shipping fees, handling fees or other charges that weren’t made clear in the original price, are what drive them away.
• 59% stated that if the shipping costs were high (even if stated upfront), in comparison to the perceived value of the product being sold, they would give a negative recommendation.

The Power of Free Shipping

Free shipping is a powerful offering that will drive your sales. A free shipping strategy can significantly increase conversion on your website, and even the size of your orders. According to the same comScore/UPS study mentioned above:

• 77% of shoppers said that free shipping was the most important part in deciding whether or not to abandon their shopping cart.
• 68% stated that they would likely recommend the store to another person if free shipping was offered.
• More than half (60%) have added items to their cart simply to qualify for free shipping.

According to a Deloitte’s 26th annual holiday survey of consumer spending intentions and trends:

• 69% are more likely to shop online retailers who offer free shipping.
• Additionally, free shipping is the top reason 20% of shoppers will shop with a particular retailer.

How Your Business Can Benefit From Free Shipping

Based on the statistics, the benefits of offering free shipping are manyfold:

Short-term gains — Free shipping will lead to more orders. It can also lead to increased average order size, particularly when a minimum value threshold is required to qualify for the offer.

Long-term gains — Many online shoppers will buy only from stores that offer free shipping, and will recommend stores that offer this perk, so gains are seen in the long-term from repeat customers and their lifetime value.

Remaining competitive — Larger retailers have set the bar, and unfortunately even if a business doesn’t gain competitive advantage or see profits by offering free-shipping, it may be what merely levels the playing field.

What Form of “Free Shipping” Will Work Best For Your Business?

Of course free shipping is great for shoppers, but is it an option for every merchant? Unless you’re Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom’s or another giant online retailer, it may not be possible for your business to offer “truly”, no-strings attached, free shipping. Absorbing all shipping and handling costs has drawbacks, the most obvious one being the loss of profit margins.

So let’s look at other approaches for offering the conversion-driving perk so you can reap the benefits and stay competitive. Keep in mind that you’re not limited to implementing a single “free shipping” offer, and that you might find that combining a few different approaches might allow you to satisfy more of your customers.

1. All free shipping, all the time — Free shipping is offered regardless of the item or order value. This method is most viable for retailers with small, lightweight products. This method could also be limited to certain locations such as a country. Zappos offers all free shipping, all the time (as well as free return shipping) on US domestic orders.
2. Free return shipping — The item is shipped at a cost, but free shipping is offered on returns. While 73% of shoppers agree that free shipping is the most important feature when purchasing online, 70% indicate that free returns is also up there. This offer is typically used with apparel and footwear retailers, as it reassures the shopper that if the item doesn’t fit, they can easily return it. E-tailers with high return rates should consider and test offering free shipping on such items, as it’s common and expected. Topshop offers free return shipping on domestic US orders.
3. Free shipping with minimum thresholds — Free shipping is offered if a minimum threshold is met. If your average order value is $40, offer free shipping on $50 orders. This method is far more realistic for retailers than the all free, all the time method. Asos offers free shipping with minimum thresholds in the US on orders above $25 and in Canada above $35.
4. Free shipping to certain locations — Free shipping is offered to certain locations, whether it’s within a country or continent. Costs are kept to a minimum with domestic shipping fees, avoiding hefty international rates.
5. Free shipping on certain items — Free shipping on specific items is a common method for retailers. Offering the perk on higher margin items will more easily absorb the shipping cost. Note: if your higher margin items span multiple product categories, you may want to make an exception to lower-margin items as well in order to communicate the offer more clearly. Free shipping on certain items could also be a way of getting rid of overstock.
6. Free shipping during certain times of year — Offering free shipping periodically rather than all year round. Holidays are typically when competition is at its peak and shoppers’ expectations are high. Periodic yet consistent free shipping will bring new customers, bring back loyal customers and will predictably drive sales. American Eagle offers free shipping every year on December 18th, for “last minute holiday shoppers”.
7. Free shipping to members only — Offering free shipping to members only is increasingly popular. Members pay an annual fee in return for exclusivity and perks like free shipping, faster delivery times, pre-sales offers, etc. Amazon Prime is an example of the free shipping, members only methodology.
8. Free shipping with loyalty programs — Free shipping is offered as an incentive to encourage repeat purchasing. There are many ways to structure your loyalty programs, the most common being points and tiers. Your loyal customers experience the free shipping perk while you experience long-term gains by increasing the lifetime value of your customers. Dell’s loyalty program offers 2nd business day shipping. Read more about different types of loyalty programs, here.
9. Flat rate shipping — This is not free shipping, rather a flat rate shipping cost no matter the item size, weight or destination. The benefits of offering flat rate shipping is that it encourages larger orders and your customers will end up paying less shipping than they would have otherwise. The drawback is that it works to the opposite effect for smaller orders, discouraging shoppers who want to buy a single or small item. At Yankee Candle you’ll pay a flat rate of $5.99 for all orders under $100.
10. Shipping fees included in price — This is also not free shipping, but including the shipping fees in the original price of the products, allows your customers to make their purchase decision based on all the pricing information at once. This leaves no room for surprises with additional costs at a later stage (at the checkout). The drawback is your prices will appear higher than competitors, and despite the “free-shipping” perk, it might drive shoppers away.

In Conclusion

Figure out what works best for your business by forming a hypothesis, then testing and closely monitoring the effect of the implementation over time. You know your store, your products, your margins and your demographics, more than anyone else, but understanding the behavior and habits of your shoppers will always be the biggest challenge. Let data be the driver behind your decisions and you’ll find what truly works best for your business. It’ll pay dividends, not to mention, your customers will thank you for it.

10 Ways You Can Offer Free Shipping was originally published in Optimizing the Ecommerce Shopping Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Deliver super relevant results

Your search results page should, first and foremost, provide only relevant and accurate search results. Sifting through irrelevant products is tedious and confusing for your customers. Search typically works by way of matching the text of the search query to the text in your product descriptions; if the search finds a match, it displays the product in the search results. But text matching is not always the best indication of relevancy, so other indicators of relevance should come into play to take your search to the next level.

By feeding your search algorithm with huge amounts of data generated from your customers in your store, your search can continuously learn, adapt and improve. Search solutions that use advanced machine learning will offer you this level of intelligence.

2. Handling multi-word search queries

With most search solutions, single-word search queries will often give relevant results without a problem (it’s the least they could do). But multi-word search queries are more complex and your search needs to be a bit more intelligent to handle them. If a customer searches for “blue suede shoes for men” they don’t expect to see all blue products, all suede products, all men’s products and all shoes. A smart search will show results for men’s shoes that are blue and made of suede.

3. Understanding synonymous words

People use different terms and expressions for different things; I might say trousers you might say pants. Your search should understand this, then learn and deliver results accordingly. If all of the products in your dataset are labelled as “earphones” but your customers are searching for “earbuds” or “headphones”, your customers will get relevant results no matter what your customer searches for, instead of reaching a dead-end 0-results page.

4. Understanding different forms of the same word

Having a “stemming” feature in your search functionality allows for a more natural search behavior. “Stemming” allows your customers to search for terms like “watch” or “watches” and get the same results. Or “running”, “runner” or “runs”, identifying them as having the root of “run” and returning all results with this understanding. It can be as simple as giving results for a “shirt” based on the given plural query of “shirts”.

5. Handling typos seamlessly

Originally Google’s brainchild, “search instead for” and “did you mean” features help your customers avoid the 0-results page whenever possible. Your search should recognize the typo and automatically provide results for products matching the correct spelling, displaying text like “0 results for ipohne, showing 20 results for iphone instead”.

6. Offer filters for fine-tuning the search results

Now that you’ve returned super relevant and accurate results to your customer, they may want to narrow them down further according to more specific criteria. These filters are a tool for the customer to fine-tune their search, getting them closer and closer to exactly what they have in mind. It’s equally as important to make sure your filtering options are relevant to the products in the results, i.e. a filter for “shoe size” should never appear in results for a “dress”.

7. Offer partial matching

It is very common that shoppers over-constrain their search results by including too many variables in their query, which will in many cases lead to the dreaded 0-results page. Partial matching is when your search gives results for one or more but not all of the terms in a multi-word query. Clearly indicate for which terms there are results and which terms have been omitted. Partial matches is also helpful because shoppers will adjust their query with the clues you’ve given them on how to reach their target results.

8. Optimize your 0-results page

“Search, more than any other activity, is a living, evolving process of discovery — a conversation between a customer and the website. Unfortunately this conversation is often fraught with miscommunication, and so it is critical for you to keep this conversation going even when the customer has initiated a search that yielded no results”. In Greg Nudelman’s book Designing Search, he gives a concise 0-results strategy with these 3 design principles:

a) Clearly indicate there are no search results, so your customer can recover. Don’t be afraid to say “I didn’t understand”, don’t try to hide the 0-results condition, that will only confuse the shopper.

b) Focus on providing your customers with a way out. Your 0-results page should never be a dead-end that makes the customer feel like they have made some sort of mistake. Every control on the 0-results page should do something to help get the customer out of the 0-results situation.

c) Provide multiple strategies within your 0-results page to recover, with links related to the spirit of the original query. If the query is over-constrained by too many variables, partial matching might help (see “#7 Offer partial matching” above). Other common methods are to display or link to “featured products”, “most-popular products”, relevant third-party resources (like contractors), or relevant advertisements.

Conclusion

This list is not exhaustive, but depending on the quality of your current search it may be a lot to consider fixing all at once. But taking care of any one of these points will already be a great improvement to you search quality and the overall experience for your customers. It’s always important to remember that customers who use your search are more likely to make a purchase, so optimizing it will definitely pay off.

Read More

This post is the last post in a three-part series about optimizing search for your e-commerce store, read the introduction “A Three Part Series: The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Search”.

In “Part One: 6 Tips for Creating the Best Search Box”, we give some advice on optimizing your search box to attract your customers to it. This is important as we know that customers who use search, are more likely to make a purchase.

In “Part Two: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Autocomplete Suggestions”, we outline the essential design patterns and features of your autocomplete overlay. A common search tool, autocomplete suggestions are nothing new, but you’d be surprised by how the small details are the difference between a good user experience and utter confusion.

Part Three: 8 Ways To Make Your Search Smarter was originally published in Optimizing the Ecommerce Shopping Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Autocomplete suggestions are like a helping hand and play a key role in how easily your customer finds what they are looking for in your store. When autocomplete suggestions work well, they help your customers form better search queries thus leading to more relevant search results. But a fair warning, on the flip side, when autocomplete suggestions work poorly they are just confusing and distracting.

Surpass your customers’ expectations by stacking these 6 features into your autocomplete overlay:

1. Search suggestions

Search suggestions start appearing when your customer begins typing in your search box, offering them suggestions that help them formulate their search query easier and faster. The suggestions act as reassurance that they’re are on the right track, getting closer to finding what they want. With the input of a single letter, your customer can already begin to see possible matches, which means they can type less and make fewer spelling mistakes. But search suggestions are less about saving time and more about guiding you customer to an accurate and relevant page of search results.

In addition to saving time and reaching a more accurate page of results, search suggestions can also act as a discovery tool, suggesting products that match their input but may not have otherwise had in mind.

2. Product matches

Like search suggestions, product matches help take some mental load of your customers and guide them towards products they may be interested in. The major difference is that, when clicked, product matches take customers directly to a specific product page, like a short cut. If your customer knows exactly what they’re looking for, this saves them time and effort by eliminating the search results page from the equation. Product matches should be reasonably limited so your customers don’t feel as though they’re doing their shopping within the small overlay.

3. Keyboard navigation

As discussed in Part 1 of this series, keyboard navigation is an important feature for your search interface. The ability to use up/down arrows to navigate the suggestions, and the “enter” key to submit the search, are a natural extension of using your keyboard to type in the search box. It’s not a default behavior of autocomplete suggestions, but offering it is a must.

4. Accommodating misspellings

Something as small as a typo could be the force behind a negative experience and a lost sale. Superior search performance means your search has the ability to recognize spelling mistakes and provide results anyways. Customers expect that mistakenly writing “ipohne” will give a suggestion for “iphone” without a second thought.

5. Adapt and improve with machine learning

Autocomplete suggestions that continuously adapt and improve will ensure your suggestions are ever-relevant. As trends and behaviors change with time, so must your autocomplete suggestions, else they’re at risk of being irrelevant. Search technologies are becoming more and more advanced and as they do, machine learning algorithms are improving the accuracy and relevancy of search results using vast amounts of data. Machine learning leads to endless possibilities, continuously adapting search suggestions is just one way to better cater to your customers.

6. Keep the style simple and clean

Visual noise will hinder your customer experience, it pulls the focus away from what’s important. As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the right amount of white-space acts as a buffer between elements and helps group elements that are related. Suggestions should be clearly separated, but not separated so much they they don’t connect as a related group. Alternating line colors and too much padding will distract customers from focusing on the suggestions and are examples of too much visual noise. Make sure the overlay can be distinguished from the rest of the page, appearing to have depth like a layer on top.

Conclusion

If your customer can easily find what they’re looking for, the chances of them making a purchase increases, so why not give them a helping hand with autocomplete suggestions. When executed correctly, they’ll improve the search and discovery experience in your store significantly.

Read more

This post is part two of of three-part series about optimizing search for your e-commerce store, read the introduction “A Three Part Series: The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Search”.

In “Part One: 6 Tips for Creating the Best Search Box”, we give some advice on optimizing your search box to attract your customers to it. This is important as we know that customers who use search, are more likely to make a purchase.

In “Part Three: 8 Ways to Make Your Search Smarter”, we get into the details of your search interface. We cover tools like filtering and sorting, and give advice on everything from your 0-results page to your pagination.

Part Two: 6 Ways To Optimize Your Autocomplete Overlay was originally published in Optimizing the Ecommerce Shopping Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Style — make it visible, keep it simple.

Your search box should be easy to spot on a quick glance. Following the notion of affordance, it should “look like it will accept textual input, and have an associated button that clearly indicates its function as a search submission”. The most familiar style is a white, rectangular input field with a submit button to the right. Highlighting the box with a colored border or styling the submit button with a contrasting color will draw even more attention.

2. Size — give it prominence.

Make your search box wide enough to accommodate the majority of queries. Bigger text boxes encourage customers to make use of your search functionality, leading them directly to relevant products. A wide search box also allows the customer to see their entire search phrase so they can more easily spot and correct typos.

3. Location — place it consistently & visibly.

Since your search box is a tool that helps customers navigate your site, it should be placed in a prominent spot, and consistently on every page. The top of your sites is by far the most commonly used and clearly visible location. Top right and top center are the most visible, as a site’s logo is often prominently placed in the top left.

4. Space — give it room to breathe.

Don’t crowd your search box with other elements or graphics. Whitespace is a powerful lack-of-stuff that acts as breathing room for the eyes so your search box doesn’t end up camouflaged or mistaken as a part of something else. According to Chaperro, Shaikh and Baker, white space may not measurably influence performance but does influence user satisfaction and experience.

5. Submit button — label it clearly.

The text on the submit button should be an intuitive action word like “search”, “go” or a use the magnifying glass icon to represent its purpose. Also, allow the Enter key on the keyboard to submit the search, as keyboard navigation is very common, but don’t rely on it alone.

6. Placeholder text — to give inspiration

Helping your customers create an expressive search query will get them closer to finding what they want. Providing direction with placeholder text helps them understand the kinds of search terms they can use to find what they’re looking for i.e. product type, color, size, SKU number, brand etc. If your store offers a wide range of products, it would be a perfect tip to let customers know what you carry. Zappos does this with their placeholder text, “Shoes, Clothing, Bags, etc.” And as an important note, it’s very important to make sure your placeholder text disappears when you click on the search box.

Conclusion

Your search bar itself is the beginning of the search journey, and an important element in your conversion funnel. Whether you’re taking creative freedom or want a traditional search bar, use these guidelines as the underlying force behind the implementation.

Read more

This post is part one of of three part series about optimizing search for your e-commerce store, read the introduction “A Three Part Series: The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Search”.

In “Part Two: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Autocomplete Suggestions”, we outline the essential design patterns and features of your autocomplete overlay. A common search tool, autocomplete suggestions are nothing new, but you’d be surprised by how the small details are the difference between a good user experience and utter confusion.

Part One: 6 Tips for Creating the Best Search Box was originally published in Optimizing the Ecommerce Shopping Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While there are services that focus on driving traffic to your site and others that optimize your checkout flows, Findify focuses on the part in between those two, providing an accurate and relevant search to your store. Prioritizing the quality of your search will pay dividends, since customers who use search while shopping online have a greater purchase intent. Offering an intelligent search to your customers will help them find what they’re looking for without hassle, so they leave as happy customers and you increase your revenue.

This three-part series is focused on guiding you towards an optimized search experience in your online store.

Part One: 6 Tips for Creating the Best Search Box

Part Two: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Autocomplete Suggestions

Part Three: 8 Ways to Make Your Search Smarter

A Three Part Series: The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Search was originally published in Optimizing the Ecommerce Shopping Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.