Online shopping frustrates customers

by Tom Diederich IDG Electroniccommerce Web sites may be losing enormous amounts of potential revenue every day simply because online consumers, frustrated by efforts to find goods on their shopping lists, are clicking away from virtual stores and, in some cases, never return, according to a new report from Zona Research, Inc. in Redwood City, Calif. Zona surveyed 239 people who use the Internet regularly and found that one in three had trouble finding products they were looking for. They also said they had abandoned online searches for merchandise at least once during the past two months. MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE n IDG.net home page n Computerworlds home page n Computerworld Emmerce n Get Media Grok and The Industry Standard Intelligencer delivered for free nReviews indepth info at IDG.net n IDG.nets personal news page n Questions about computers Let IDG.nets editors help you n Search IDG.net in 12 languages n Subscribe to IDG.nets free daily newsletter for IT leaders nNews Radio n Computerworld Minute n Fusion audio primers n n n We were not expecting to find these kinds of numbers because this was basically a group of savvy computer users, said Jack Staff, chief economist at Zona Research. And when you have almost onethird of them saying Web shopping was extremely difficult or somewhat difficult, we think the average population is having even more difficulty. The results are significant, Staff said, because they suggest a significant loss of potential revenue. If you get 100 hits a day and onequarter of them are dropping off and especially if its related to your bottom line then that could have a lot of impact. And if shoppers consistently cant find what theyre looking on a site, they may leave and never return. To reverse this trend, online merchants must bring the product to the customer in a way that is more like a brickandmortar situation, Staff said. Web vendors need to concentrate on making it easier for Web shoppers to quickly and painlessly find the exact products they want, the report said. One problem is the way Web sites have set up their search capabilities, he pointed out. Right now, if you go online to a sites search area and hit coat, you might get coat of paint, you might get dress coat or you might get sports coat, when what youre looking for is a purple and orange cashmere coat in a 42 long, he said.