Upper Clash: Wavering Purchase – What's causing customers to hit pause on purchases?

At Inviqa, we talk a fair bit about creating seamless or friction-free customer purchase journeys in ecommerce. This is good for the customer as it allows them to complete their purchase without frustration and supports a more consistent and potentially higher revenue stream for businesses.

So, what causes a customer to hit pause on a purchase? And how often is it something that’s due to a technical issue or design decision on the website vs just human behaviour?

Because let’s be honest. How many incomplete purchases do you have open on your computer right now? And how many of those are because you got distracted while checking out?

This was the question put to a panel of experts in experience design and commerce at a recent Upper Clash event. 

Inviqa’s director of experience design Jamie Stantonian took part in the discussion. 

Here’s what we learned.

Friction: Bad UX or human emotion blocking the purchase?

When it comes to the question of how much of what we consider ‘conversion friction’ is driven by emotional needs rather than technical or UX issues, Jamie’s answer was a predictable ‘it depends’.

While technical issues and bad UX can certainly cause someone to drop off during the purchase journey, these aren’t necessarily the only causes. There are plenty of instances where customers will put up with a bad user experience if they’ve got their sights set on a specific product, and this is the only/best place to get it.

Conversely, a ruthlessly optimised website can make it easier for a buyer to complete a purchase, but if the timing isn’t right, or the item is of a higher value, the customer may need more time to consider the purchase before they hit ‘buy now’. And this is something which no amount of optimisation will change.

Jamie explains how both UX and emotion can have an impact on buying behaviour and how likely someone is to complete a purchase or abandon it.

Don’t make UX decisions based only on data

This links back to the ‘it depends’ answer above. Customer purchase journeys aren’t always linear, no matter how much we might like them to be. It’s not only that people may idle over a purchase for months, it’s also that people don’t necessarily complete a purchase on a single device.

People move from mobile to desktop, or even brick and mortar, and back again. Unless you have interconnected data between those channels, a purchase started on mobile and completed on desktop could look like a purchase that’s been abandoned and require attention when that’s not the case.

Jamie talks about some user research that was done that showed that for large, considered purchases, many people still choose to complete purchases on desktop, even if they started their research on mobile.

Similarly, just because a customer has left an item in their basket for weeks on end, it doesn’t mean there’s something you have (or haven’t) done that’s caused this pause. An interrupted purchase doesn’t equate to an abandoned purchase. They may have gotten distracted and forgotten about it, or are waiting for their next paycheque to clear, and normal purchase programming will resume momentarily.

Pressure tactics don’t work

They may be everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they’re effective. Consumers are savvy to those little nudges trying to instil a sense of FOMO, and in most instances, have no positive influence over purchase decisions, viewing them as manipulative rather than persuasive.

Possibly because it’s based on 90s psychological studies, and there haven’t been a lot of follow-up studies on how these tactics may affect brand perception. 

Jamie talks about how these little nudges are based on pre-internet research and how their impact on brand perception hasn’t been researched.

It’s not that they never work – but the cases where they convince someone to ‘buy now’ are less common than the prevalence of this tactic would indicate, and what we don’t see in the data is how these nudges may damage brand credibility when people don’t buy what the nudge is selling them. One of the reasons behind this is the question around the legitimacy behind those nudges – are there only 5 left in the whole entire world? Or is that just until you restock?

And brand trust and authenticity are incredibly important to today’s consumers. While these nudges may work in the short term, they rarely foster customer relationships.

Content is key

How brand trust can be created is through content. From product content to shipping costs and timelines, providing customers with the “right information at the right time” – while a contrived statement – is nevertheless probably one of the best actions you can take to reduce friction along the buyer journey and build an emotional connection.

This can require a balance between focusing on the technical specs of an item and how the product may meet an emotional need (e.g., I need a fan powerful enough to keep us cool, but it has to be quiet because my kid’s a light sleeper) which will ultimately depend on the product you sell and the target audience, what those key drivers to purchase are and what information they need to help them make that decision.

And for some people, shipping costs and timelines, and return policies can be just as important to the buyer’s decision as the product itself, so don’t hide this information at the end of the purchase journey. It’s something that’s been raised in previous conversations around conversion rate optimisation, but having this type of information on product pages means people are less likely to drop off at the checkout due to timing or cost shock. 

What brands also need to consider is how well their content is set up for conversational commerce driven by AI. As it becomes a preferred channel for consumers to find information about products before they go anywhere near a purchase funnel, brands need to think about how their product data is structured and how their content is being surfaced across AI-driven channels. If your product data isn’t optimised for AI, you risk being invisible at the very moment a customer is ready to act.

 

If you don’t know, ask

Ultimately, if you’re worried that there’s something on your website stopping people from completing a purchase, the best thing you can do is talk to your customers, do user research, and understand what’s really going on rather than trying to fix things that may not be the cause.

Getting a better understanding of how your customers shop, what need at various stages of the decision journey and what potential technical issues are causing them to abandon or delay a purchase will give you a better idea of what truly needs to be addressed and the actions you can take, rather than spending time tinkering to try and figure out what works.

If you’re interested in getting a better idea of what may be causing friction along your purchasing journey, how to fix it, and start optimising content for AI search, get in touch. We can audit your website to see if there are any obvious technical or content-based actions that can be taken to improve conversion, or conduct user research to get to the bottom of what’s really going on.