78% Of Shoppers Will Buy From Amazon If A Company’s Website Is Poor

Stephen McCance September 23, 2014

New research of 1000 UK customers shows that 78% of people will head to Amazon if they don’t like or trust your website. Take a look at our checklist to make sure your e-commerce site is up to scratch.

Unfortunately for e-commerce sites, online shoppers are the pickiest of them all. You have to make a good first impression or face losing the customer to a competitor. On average, it takes people between 5 and 10 seconds to decide if they like, trust and would buy from a website and if, god forbid your website doesn’t sell a certain product then 31% will change allegiance to your competitor.

It gets even worse! If your website isn’t up to scratch aesthetically and doesn’t have all of the features online shoppers have grown to know and love then you’ll in all likelihood lose them to Amazon. New e-commerce research by Digital River of 1000 UK shoppers showed that 78% of people would head straight over to Amazon to buy the product listed on your site if they don’t trust or like the look of it.

Many website owners make excuses for their site and say that if the product is good enough then people will buy it, this isn’t the case anymore. Online shopping is growing year on year still and people are faced with more options than ever before, unless you can offer the best possible user experience you WILL lose out. Of course, if you own a store on Amazon then you may well end up getting the sale in the end but you will have paid far more in seller fee’s than you would if you’d sold it on your own website in the first place.

Here’s a checklist of some basic principles e-commerce sites need to follow if they want to gain a user’s trust:

– The websites design needs to be continually updated, it has to be cutting edge and follow the latest trends used by the bigger companies.

– Make sure you have a blog/social media feed on your site and update them regularly. If you saw the last post was 5 months ago, would you buy?

– The menu and filters for browsing products must be easy to use, intuitive and FAST.

– Keep your stock levels up to date, there is nothing worse as a buyer than to pay for a product and then get an email the next day saying it is out of stock and having to wait 5 days for a refund. You will never see that customer again.

– Use familiar logos to gain a user’s trust e.g. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Yelp etc…

– Don’t overcharge for delivery and offer free returns, this is a great incentive that has worked wonders for many top clothing/fashion sites.