Research Shows That Poor Product Content is Still Driving Customer Frustration

To say that online retail has had a “good time” in the past year is a gross understatement. With the global pandemic in full force and people’s movements restricted, millions of people in multiple countries turned to the internet, not just for their essential groceries but for all the items they would otherwise be buying on the (shuttered) high street.

However, with vaccine rates rising worldwide and economies starting to open up again (albeit with the continuing complications caused by the Delta variant), there has been one constant question on retailers’ lips: will these new customers now abandon online for the high street? How much of that lovely online growth is temporary? How bad will the backslide be?

Answers range from the anxious to the bullish, but the truth is that it is still too early to tell how much of a permanent change has occurred in people’s shopping habits. However, what we do have is a prime opportunity to capture as many of those consumers as loyal, online customers of your brand as possible.

Selling online continues to have challenges. Recent research by Walnut Unlimited on behalf of Ve Global has identified some of the customer difficulties and frustrations that plague online purchases. Chief amongst these, as has long been the case, is a lack of clear information. A quarter of respondents said they’d had trouble when trying to browse for products online, while over 20% said that they had encountered confusing or missing product information. Over a third of electronics customers said they missed the buying advice that often came with in-person shopping experiences.

These are not insurmountable problems. There are new technologies to help fill the experiential gap that customers find online vs the high street. There are new and more accessible formats to get the story of your product across. And, at the centre of it all is the continuing need to have clear and consistent product information for your products, on every page they are listed. If we’re able to deliver on these fundamental aspects of the buying experience, we’re already well on our way to making a customer an online retail convert.