Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

I was doing a Google search and noticed something new on a PPC ad …

Want to get a sense for how many etailers are out there?  Get this- Magento is one out of a reported 600 shopping carts (source).  Magento alone is cart of choice for 75,000 etailers (source).  You do the math.

Most retailers offer shipping specials above a minimum order amount.  Not GivingGallery.com:

Retailers love gift cards for a number of different reasons and if recent surveys are to be believed they have one more. Turns out only 63% of gift cards are ever redeemed and this means that retailers get to pocket the difference, all 27% of it. You can read the rest of the story at the Get Elastic blog.

- Most eCommerce sites have a 4% conversion rate (though some like Amazon and QVC have conversion rates of 20% and 17% respectively).

- Of the top 100 eTailers only 35 have conversion rates over 5%. (source: getelastic.com)

- 81% of shoppers are more likely to buy online with easy returns. (source: IR)

- According to Bryan Eisenberg (FutureNow) first time visitors typically convert 2% while repeat shoppers convert 8%.

- One of the largest segments of your visitor population is the first time visitor, representing between 60-80% of your traffic. (Bryan Eisenberg, FutureNow)

- Statistics show at least 20% of your site’s visitors enter ready to buy (source: FutureNow blog)

- Online commerce, at $156 billion, represents 3.9% of total retail sales (which is approx. $4.1 Trillion).  Growing at 10% YOY.  Forrester (source) estimates online retail will grow to $279 billion by 2015.

- Retail is 60% of US economy.

- 40% of all online visitors use insite search.

- 25% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart. (Forrester)

- 47% of e-commerce sites do not know their abandonment rate. (Internet Retailer Magazine)

- 40% of online shoppers are dissatisfied with their online purchase experience. (Forrester)

- Of the top 100 eTailers those that did not ask for CVV numbers have a 40% higher conversion rate. (source: getelastic.com)

- Nearly three-quarters of shoppers will leave an ecommerce site within two minutes of not finding the products they are looking for. (source: internetretailer.com)

- 40% of Americans return at least one gift after the holidays. (source: National Retail Federation)

- According to a Jupiter Research article more people write a product review about a product they like vs a product they don’t like (9% vs. 4%). [Source: SiteBrand]

- According to Forrester 83% of shoppers place greatest trust on friends or acquaintances who have used a product or service.

- In a study of online retailers it was found 27% of visitors intended to buy but only two-thirds actually bought.  Amongst those that intended to buy but didn’t 31% wanted better product selection, 24% desired better shipping options, 17% cited problems with the online shopping cart, and 14% said prices were too high.  Translation: you’re existing customer base is spending 33% less than they intend to! [Source: GrokDotCom]

- There are 48,000 Yahoo! ecommerce stores [IR]

- Want to get a sense of how many etailers are out there?  Get this- Magento is one out of a reported 600 shopping carts (source).  Magento alone is cart of choice for 75,000 etailers (source).  You do the math.

- 74% of comments about products are transmitted through face to face conversations (Source: The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited)

- It’s estimated that 1/4 of all retail transactions will occur online by 2012 (Source: Elastic Path blog post)

- The combined sales of the 500 largest web retailers in 2008 grew nearly eight times faster than the overall market. (Soure: IR)

- According to a 2005 comScore study, people perform an average of 13 searches before converting (Source: Elastic Path blog post)

- One of the worst culprits for friction in the checkout process is required registration. Forrester Research reports that 23% of customers abandoned the last online store that asked them to register (Source: Elastic Path blog post)

- A study for edmunds.com found that when search trigger keywords were found on the landing page visitors were successful 72% of the time. (Source: YouTube interview w/ Bryan Eisenberg)

- Cross-sells were responsible for 35% of amazon.com sales in 2006 (Source: Get Elastic blog article)

- 90% of polled online shoppers claim they would have completed (an otherwise abandoned sale) if they saw security logos (Source: Get Elastic blog article)

- Correlation between loads time and abandon rates: Almost half of visitors will abandon a site if they perceive a page or feature takes longer than 2 seconds to load (Source: Get Elastic blog article)

- Roughly 1,300 purchases generate 1 review (Source: Jared Spool presentation)

- Chat stats (via Get Elastic blog article) – Visitors invited after 2-3 minutes on site have a 79% greater likelihood to accept than a website visitor who’s been on site for less time.  Repeat visitors are 64% more likely to engage in proactive chats than first-time visitors.  Canadian electronics retailer The Source only invites inside their shopping cart and they experience an over 20% acceptance rate.

- If you think you are a late entrant to search engine marketing, consider this:  According to Google 25% of daily search queries have never been searched before.

- Wine and fancy chocolates tend to have wide price ranges.  This is partly why they are popular gift items (because it’s hard for the recipient to guess how much the giver paid). (Source: Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value)

- At least 10% of your audience has some form of vision impairment that makes it difficult for them to see your website as you intended it to be seen.  (Source: Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results)

- PETCO.com found that products without reviews have a 20.4% higher return rate than those with reviews, and products with 50+ reviews have a return rate that is half of those with less than 5 reviews. (Source)

- Research by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz demonstrated that people estimate instructions to be twice as difficult to perform when written in a fancy, complicated font versus a simple font. (Source)

- Going from zero reviews to one review with 4.2 stars or better improves conversion rates (sales) by 20 percent. (Source)

- For every $92 marketers spend on driving traffic to their site, they spend $1 on converting that traffic. (Source)

- Users often leave web pages in 10–20 seconds.  But, if you have a clear value proposition that entices them to stay half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web.  (Source)

- The first advertisement was published in a British newspaper in 1609.  It was an ad for migration opportunities to America.  (Source)