3 Sources of Additional Sales Hiding in Your Existing Shopify Traffic & How to Capture Them

–TLDR (super short version) —

We analyzed internal data from 20 successful Shopify stores. Here are the top 3 things preventing willing and able shoppers from buying:

1.  35.5% have product questions before placing anything in cart 
2. 15.5% encounter checkout problems 
3. Almost every store occasionally has bugs preventing customers from moving forward (19 of 20 stores)

These issues were discovered and solved using our Shopify texting app. Read on for more details.

–Full Version–

Shopify sellers spend millions of dollars driving traffic to their stores. Most of that money is wasted on traffic that doesn’t complete a purchase.

We analyzed 5,000 text messages sent between shoppers had Shopify sellers to find out why this happens and how to prevent it. These are our initial findings. 

Methodology

• A sample of 1,000 conversations, or about 5,000 text messages
• Messages sent to and from 20 different Shopify stores
• All messages were sent between May 2016 and May 2017
• A human analyzed each conversation and categorized it into:

1. Point in customer journey: Pre-cart, In-cart, Post-order
2. Subject of conversation: product question, checkout error etc.
3. Outcome (where available): purchase, upsell, chargeback prevented, review generated etc.

 

The 3 main types of problems holding back most stores

1. Product Questions

35.5% of conversations were from customers in the “pre-cart” stage.

These are customers that browsed around the store and are interested in a product but have one or two questions before they buy. For example, questions about expedited shipping or product materials. We’ll break down those exact question types in a future post.

The common denominator of these questions is that they are usually easy to answer and often lead to a sale. In fact, these questions are often addressed in the FAQ, but shoppers don’t have the patience to look, especially not on mobile.

While the questions are easy – the hard part is getting the customer to make the effort to reach out and ask.

2. Checkout Questions

15.5% of conversations were from customers who have already added a product to their cart.

These are the customers closest to becoming actual revenue. They are stuck at checkout either for an objective reason (e.g. credit card doesn’t go through) or a subjective reason (e.g. shipping fee is above their budget). Either way, you want them to reach out so you can solve the problem and save that sale.

Again, most of these are recurring problems and easy to solve – the hard part is getting customers to reach out.

The last one is the most surprising:

3. Bugs and Errors

19 of 20 stores had at least one bug or error texted in by shoppers.

These issues were the kind that prevent sales -from buttons that don’t work to incorrect product description. While bugs and errors were a small portion of conversations (3%), every one of them is the cause of multiple missed conversions until fixed.

Now you know, what should you do?

As this data shows, there are conversion opportunities in this existing traffic. These shoppers left the site without completing a purchase because there’s friction between them and checkout, and not because they weren’t interested in making a purchase.

Next Steps

Head to your store and test:

How easy it is for “almost converted” shoppers to reach out to you?

What friction can you remove? Remove it now!

*Don’t forget to test on both mobile and desktop.

We collected this conversation data from stores using our texting widget Message Mate which helps stores capture hidden conversion opportunities in existing traffic