To grow your business in 2021, it’s critical you understand why consumers aren’t choosing to click ‘buy’, along with the steps you can take to address their concerns and push them to become a customer. 

In this webinar, Tone Messaging and Teikametrics share detailed insights from 2020 on the most frequent reasons why consumers don’t buy, and what you can do in 2021 to create a feedback loop that strengthens your marketing across Amazon and your D2C site.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Highlighting data around why consumers aren’t converting on your Amazon & D2C product pages
  • Detailing common questions Tone Messaging sees on D2C sites and how those should inform your Amazon presence
  • Creating a process for taking customer feedback and effectively incorporating it into your marketing
  • Underscoring examples of how brands can make best use of these tactics now and into 2021

Your hosts

  • Tivan Amour, Co-Founder & CEO, Tone
  • Jason Magee, Senior Director of Sales, Teikametrics

Recap of Reasons Consumers Don’t Buy

Top 5 reasons consumers don't convert pie chart

Jason and Tivan explained that while the title of the webinar is “10 reasons,” they actually planned to share 5 reasons customers don’t convert, with each reason being discussed in the two different contexts of marketplaces and DTC. 

The 5 reasons come from an analysis of questions and complaints shared via Tone’s SMS app across a wide variety of DTC merchants. They’re reasons customers who got very close to converting then abandoned the purchase.

Webinar participants were invited to guess the top 5, and we were impressed at how well people did at this! Without further ado, here are the reasons customers don’t convert, along with strategies to try to address the issues and ease the path to conversion.

5. Shipping takes too long. 

Customers ask questions like, “How long will shipping take?” because Amazon has set the gold standard of two-day Prime shipping and customers have come to expect orders to arrive quickly.

What’s the advice to address this? Make sure product detail pages, checkout, and FAQs have the most up-to-date shipping information. Also, adopt a multi-warehouse strategy if possible to fulfill orders more rapidly.

4.  Being out of stock. 

“The item I want is out of stock,” is the kind of a roadblock a customer will encounter here. To limit this as a problem, set up back-in-stock alert sign-ups on PDPs. You can also try sending frequent back-in-stock updates. 

On the DTC side, suggest good alternatives based on your knowledge of the product catalog. This does require having an awareness of the products to make a relevant suggestion.

3. Shipping is too expensive. 

This especially comes up when customers are surprised by shipping costs after they’ve made a purchase decision based on price. 

Ways to address this include rolling shipping costs into the product price to minimize shopper confusion. The next best thing is to create free-shipping thresholds, turning the shipping costs into upsell opportunities. You can also try using an app like Skubana or EasyShip to find the lowest shipping rate.

2. Site Errors. 

Customers express frustrations such as, “This site is hard to use/broken.” This type of complaint can refer to a range of issues – from payments not going through properly to any element of the site not functioning as a shopper expects.

Address this by making sure you have a support team that can address shoppers’ issues in minutes. Also, make it easy to checkout by providing multiple payment options — Paypal, Shoppay, Applepay, Affirm. Finally, make sure the site is built to be able to handle quick changes when there’s an error.

1. Can I get a discount? 

This category includes customer responses to being offered a possible discount. Things to test for this include giving the shopper an unexpected discount amount. The best way to drive revenue is to offer a discount increase of 2%, rather than only thinking in increments of 5%.

You can also try out selling the unique value of the product or, as a last resort, pointing the customer toward a more suitable product within their budget.

Timestamps:

[2:18] Meet Jason and Tivon

[9:01] Introduction to the top 5 reasons customers don’t convert 

[10:47] Reason #5: Shipping takes too long

[15:36] Reason #4: Being out of stock 

[24:48] Reason #3: Shipping is too expensive

[30:23] Reason #2: Site errors

[40:05] Reason #1: Can I get a discount? 

[53:48] Pie chart showing how the reasons stack up

[53:56] Q&A highlight common questions from sellers like you

Watch the full replay: