Retail and ecommerce

Reading the statistics on cart abandonment rates can be quite sobering. Sixty-seven percent of online carts are abandoned before a purchase is made and, apparently, about 97 percent of mobile carts are abandoned. The reasons oft quoted are myriad but one of the bigger issues is simply the time it takes to check out; the longer it takes, the more likely that your customer will become distracted. Plus, when the shopping process requires any significant amount of typing on a mobile, forget it! Although you have to find a way to enable accurate address capture and to collect other important information, requiring customers to input too much is surely one reason that the mobile abandonment rate is so high.

The digital economy is coming, says IDC, and traditional organizations will need to adapt in order to stay relevant—and fast! This new economy, which is facilitated by technologies such as the cloud, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and augmented and virtual reality, is rapidly changing the way business is done both here in the U.S. and abroad. According to IDC’s research, 33 percent of the current U.S. economy is digitized, and by 2020 (just three years away) they predict that 50 percent of the global 2,000 will see a majority of their businesses digitized.

In my role, I frequently talk to retailers and I find that many are facing challenges with disparate, sometimes outdated systems. Oftentimes they are using multiple vendors for their necessary technology solutions. This can create a headache when retailers have data initiatives that span these multiple platforms. 

Now that the busy holiday season is winding down and we’ve turned the calendar, retailers are refocusing their attention to driving sales in 2017. Retailers are always keen to hear what their peers and competitors were doing to improve customer experiences and drive sales. Here are five things those in the retail industry should keep top of mind in 2017. 

Retailers often tell us about their endless pursuit to create a seamless buying experience: a utopian idea that has dominated the industry for years. This pursuit can often seem never ending, especially as technology and consumer expectations seem to outpace retailers’ ability to keep up. Meanwhile, according to Shopify, shopping cart abandonment rates hover around 67 percent, with many customers claiming they leave websites with full shopping carts because of complicated or long checkout processes.

For over 20 years, we at Experian Data Quality have been helping business like you succeed, by giving you confidence back in your data. Whether you’re ensuring the collection of valid addresses or looking to improve your overall user experience, our mission has, and will continue to revolve around powering business opportunities with quality data.

This is why we’re excited to announce a new addition to our address verification solution. As you look to expand your businesses within your country as well as internationally, we are expanding our capabilities to scale along with you every step of the way.

We are thrilled to roll out our new Global Intuitive address validation solution to help you do just that! Our Global Intuitive address verification solution will allow you to capture validated address in real time through a predictive engine.

Here’s an exercise for you: Go to Google. Type in, “The three necessities of life.” What’s the first result? I’ll save you the keystrokes—unlike most searches, the first result doesn’t link to a website. The answer’s so obvious that Google provides one for you. Food, (including water), shelter, and clothing. No matter what culture, time era, or religion, everyone agrees that in life, these are the absolute three necessities of survival. Without food and water, you die.  Without shelter or clothing to protect you from the elements, guess what, you die. 

It sounds counter-intuitive, but a very impactful approach to customer satisfaction is to minimize the number of customer interactions. Let me explain. Each interaction requires retailers to invest considerable effort to meet and exceed customers’ expectations. The more interactions or steps there are to the customer journey, the harder it becomes to deliver a great overall customer experience.

No one should dispute the importance of mobile in today’s shopping journey. But what may be disputed is whether the focus should be on mobile apps or mobile browsers. I’m here to tell you why, before you go all out in developing a mobile app, you should consider optimizing your mobile browsing experience first.

It may go against what a lot of your peers are saying, but the mobile browsing experience is paramount to the mobile app experience. Your mobile apps house your most loyal customers; they’ll come back to you no matter what (unless, of course, you miss spectacularly on their expectations). If you want to continue growing your customer base, however, making sure new shoppers have a good experience all around means investing in a better mobile browsing experience. Let’s find out how to go about that, shall we?

Whether we are talking about store associates wielding mobile POS devices or consumers sporting their mobile phones, mobile digital transactions are on the rise and gaining in importance.

The latest studies* show that online purchasing has now become the preference, just beating out other forms of purchasing (e.g. store, catalog) by 51 percent to 49 percent. And 77 percent of mobile phone users have used their devices during the shopping process, with over 40 percent having completed a mobile purchase. This number rises to over 60 percent for Millennials. Clearly online and in particular, mobile online shopping, is redefining the shopping experience for a large portion of the population.