When you are standing at the checkout in a store, it is easy to notice when customers become anxious or irritated. Nervous glances at the clock, loud sighing, customers’ body language… these are all clear signs that the payment process is not going the way customers would like. But how do you recognize such frustration in online shoppers? Physical distance from the customer does not allow us to see the signs of nervousness listed above. However, that must not be an excuse. It is crucial for merchants to identify and solve the problems that spoil the overall shopping experience and reduce the payment conversion rate.
Tracking behavioral parameters during online shopping, such as the number of clicks or the conversion rate, can give merchants a good idea of what should be optimized in the online payment process. It has been shown, for example, that adding the three most popular alternative payment methods can increase conversion by as much as 30%. Services such as the one offered by ClickTale go much deeper. With “heatmap” analysis and other powerful tools, it is much easier to understand the behavior of online shoppers. More recent research has also included other methods that can be applied extremely successfully, such as “discomfort analysis”.
A New Look at Online Shopping Behavior
IT expert Jeffrey Jenkins conducted research on how negative emotions – anger, frustration, confusion – can be detected through mouse movements. According to research at his “Brigham Young” University titled “How to Recognize Emotions Through Mouse Movements”, consumer anxiety and confusion manifest themselves in mouse movements becoming imprecise and jerky. Somewhat counterintuitively, anxious consumers often move the mouse somewhat more slowly… The goal of the research was to process a sufficient amount of such data to draw a precise conclusion, which could potentially have a number of practical implications for web developers who want to reduce or, even better, eliminate the processes that lead to customers’ negative emotions.
“It has always been very difficult to assess when a user became frustrated, which led to them never returning to the site again,” says Jenkins. “If we are able to sense a user’s negative emotion, we can adapt the site so that it eliminates the user’s stress or offers them help.”
Reducing the Causes of Checkout Anxiety
The technology has already been patented and implemented by a local startup company that holds the sole license. How it will develop further and how it can be used in e-commerce remains to be seen, but taking into account the general trend of payment “API-zation”, we can easily imagine a scenario in which this kind of technology is built into plugins for well-known e-commerce shops.
As a result of all this, merchants will be able to understand more precisely all aspects of customer behavior during payment, especially those that lead to negative emotions. How much does a slow-loading page annoy customers? Are customers left in doubt when they are redirected to “someone else’s” pages to enter their card details? Is frustration inevitable when a site does not offer the requested payment methods or they do not work well enough? How do customers react to 3D Secure transactions? Each of these questions can lead to growing dissatisfaction and, ultimately, to payment abandonment – and that is the last thing merchants want! Better understanding and active insight can only be an advantage, especially when it comes to conversion optimization, which has the greatest impact on a merchant’s revenue.
What About Mobile Devices?
The study mentioned above looked at mouse cursor behavior. However, as shopping through mobile devices takes the lead over classic e-commerce (the share of mobile devices in online shopping was 40% in 2015, and crossing the magic threshold of 50% is expected soon), it is perfectly clear that merchants must also pay due attention to the specifics of this payment channel.
The “mobile first” strategy focuses on optimizing payment flows and better understanding the specifics of shopping through mobile devices. Whether a study similar to the one above will be applicable by tracking finger movements on touchscreens remains to be seen (although there are already indications that this will be possible).
In any case, the bottom line is that merchants need to pay attention to and use new technologies and tools like these, developed with the aim of optimizing payments across all channels.