The Unhappy Customer: Why Online Customers Are Getting Frustrated

Let’s just get into it. Online consumers are unhappy. According to a new survey just 15% of consumers are satisfied with their online shopping experiences. The survey covered people from the US, the UK, Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland.

The causes of such unhappiness will be familiar to brands and retailers, who have tried to drive down such annoyances in their customers. But they continue to persist.

• The number one reason (49%) was pop-ups and advertisements.
• The second reason (48%) was the website crashing during the checkout process.
• The third reason (45%) was when a discount code fails.
• Fourthly (42%) was when they couldn’t find the items they were looking for.
• And fifthly (23%) was when the website or app suddenly went offline.

A separate finding from the survey highlighted our continuing reluctance to head to the store and shop inside. Just over one-in-three (37%) are still avoiding physical stores during the holiday season.

These findings highlight the level of which consumers want and demand high online shopping experiences. It’s a demand that is growing among consumers at the same time as technological developments have made tailoring individual digital experiences ever more possible. Yet issues with heavy traffic as consumers move online, along with delayed or neglected infrastructure updates, have all contributed to the general unhappiness with online shopping experiences.

As a response, brands and retailers must focus on creating more robust, effective online experiences. “The need to build positive experience is … being accelerated in 2021,” said Jonathan Cherki, the CEO of Contentsquare, “with Google launching a new ranking algorithm designed to judge web pages based on user experiences. It will score a webpage on several areas of a site’s page, including load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads.”

Building better ecommerce infrastructure requires a lot of work. And there’s a lot of tools and platforms that, when employed, are able to provide the firepower to connect better with customers, and give them better digital journeys. 

Certain platforms are more limited in what they can do, while others have been specifically built to tailor the needs of high-volume retailers who require complex solutions to complex infrastructure. The former being platforms such as WooCommerce (the ecommerce plugin for WordPress); the latter being platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC).

A general focus on ecommerce is all well and good. But within the digital world it matters where you’re emphasizing and focusing on. This Black Friday witnessed 2.8 million mobile shopping app downloads in a single day, breaking new records. While the rise of mobile ecommerce is set to become the default next year, with forecasts of mobile ecommerce sales to reach 54% of all ecommerce sales.

With mobile clearly in the ascendency, brands and retailers would reap the benefits of a mobile-first strategy. And it just happens to be that SFCC’s latest version, Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) is designed specifically for companies wanting a mobile-first vision of their ecommerce.

Of course, the pandemic has brought to the forefront all the issues, headaches, and neglected aspects of ecommerce, and exposed them to the light of 2020. And consumers have spoken about what they want, and what they don’t currently like about online experiences.

2021 will be the year for brands and retailers to fix that. And put more smiles on the faces of their customers.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.