Consumers are finding that their expectations are not being met and are leaving their carts without buying.
Contact Solutions has now released the results of some of its most recent research, which have shown that consumers have high expectations when it comes to their mobile shopping experiences, and when online stores fail to meet those expectations, those shoppers will typically abandon their carts without actually making a purchase.
The study showed that consumers use smartphones more to shop, but need better customer care.
The study was entitled “Mobile Shopping Cliffhanger,” and it revealed that while individuals are turning to their smartphones and tablets on an increasing basis in order to conduct their product searches and price checks, they do need a higher level of customer care available to them. The Contact Solutions director of marketing, John Hibel, said that “Retailer investments in online and mobile shopping experiences are starting to pay off, but keeping the trend going requires much more attention to customer care.”
While mobile shopping is going on quite a bit, it doesn’t take much for a cart to simply be abandoned.
Hibel went on to explain that “Customers are using apps more frequently for shopping, but when they encounter problems and cannot get the help they need, the results are disastrous for retailers.”
Among the key findings that were published in the report were the following:
• Approximately three quarters of all shoppers shop on the internet on some kind of device, be it laptop, smartphone, tablet, desktop, or another connected machine. About 30 percent of shoppers use mobile devices for this purpose at least as much as they use their laptops or desktops.
• One in every ten shoppers prefer mobile shopping apps for doing their online shopping.
• Sixteen percent of consumers say that they face some sort of struggle with shopping apps in at least half of their experiences with those applications. Moreover, 38 percent of respondents said that they were disappointed when they were not able to access customer support assistance within a shopping app.
• Fifty one percent of shoppers will abandon their cart and close the app after they have faced a struggle in retail mobile shopping. After this same scenario, 20 percent will cease to use that app, completely.
