Shoppers of the Web Unite: User Experience and Ecommerce

Seth Gordon, May 15, 2000

Yikes! Have you seen these stats? If you're keeping up with the consumer side of e-commerce, I bet that you have, perhaps even more than once.

• 75% of respondents abandoned their cart without making a purchase — Bizrate.com
  
  
• $6 Billion dollars in sales may have been lost during the holiday season — Creative Good
  
  
• 27% of all web transactions are abandoned at the payment screen — Forrester

Such figures suggest that the industry is in a state of crisis. At first glance, the figures may appear worrisome. On a more rational level, these numbers are cause for much optimism. If there weren't any statistics, it might mean that nobody was paying attention to the industry. Obviously, that's not the case. These statistics help us identify problems and identification is the first step towards finding a solution. Let's move on to step two in the process: apprehending the guilty party. Then, we'll take a look at a few examples.

Poor User Experience
The problems that fuel these statistics generally aren't from hard-to-fix situations, such as immature technologies, lack of consumer interest, or even worse, some sort of voodoo that nobody can figure out. Rather, they stem from a theme that is easy to identify and relatively straightforward to remedy. There is a consistent culprit that contributes to the above numbers. What is it? Poor User Experience (UX).