Why the ‘last click’ in e-commerce matters — and how to get it right
What issue does the e-commerce industry face that is the largest and most obvious?
Checkout. By that, I mean consumers who make their way to a retailer’s digital store, choose an item to purchase, put it to their cart, and then go to the checkout page—only to abandon the process at that point.
Even while it may seem like a minor problem, some industry estimates put the cost to merchants at billions of dollars. Despite the magnitude of the checkout problem, many to-do lists put off resolving it until the very last minute.
Checkout being at the bottom of the funnel contributes to this in part. Ad campaigns, sponsored traffic, product-market fit, media relations, and everything else that seems substantial and significant are at the top of the funnel.
Companies invest time, resources, and effort into attracting customers, creating valuable goods and services, and retaining them in their e-commerce ecosystem. Typically, marketing teams are in charge of several of the aforementioned levers; they manage sponsored social, SEO, SEM, billboards, and all other customer-attracting efforts.
Technical and product teams, as well as often someone in charge of payment infrastructure, are at the bottom of the funnel. Those individuals are often judged on whether things function, rather not on how effectively they function.
Checkout ends up being an orphan since it is neither the marketing team’s primary emphasis nor a major area of interest for product and technical leaders. Customers display high levels of “purchase intent” when shopping without actually making any purchases.
To put it more succinctly: You could have mastered the funnel’s top, but there’s a good chance you overlooked the holes in the bottom.
But how can you persuade senior leadership to support lost conversion and broken checkout as a critical area of strategic emphasis in a world when resources are limited and time is even more so?
