Why the ‘last click’ in e-commerce matters — and how to get it right – TechCrunch
What is the Biggest and Most Obvious Problem for Ecommerce Merchants?
Cash. By that I mean customers who find their way into a retailer’s digital home, decide to purchase an item, add the item to their cart and hit checkout – only to have the last part of the transaction abandoned.
This may seem like a small problem, but it’s actually a huge cost to retailers – billions of dollars by some industry estimates. But despite the size of the checkout problem, fixing the problem also ends up being the last item on many to-do lists.
That’s partly because the cash register is at the bottom of the funnel. At the top of the funnel are the big, splashy elements: advertising campaigns, paid traffic, product-to-market fit, media relations, and anything that feels weighty and important.
Businesses spend time, money, and energy bringing people into business, building meaningful products and services, and retaining those people in their e-commerce ecosystem. In general, marketing teams control many of the above levers – they run paid social, SEO and SEM marketing, billboards and any other campaigns that attract customers.
Every marketing dollar at the top of the funnel can be increased with a focus on checkout.
At the bottom of the funnel are engineering and product teams, and typically someone responsible for payment infrastructure. These people tend to get graded if Things work – not necessarily how Good They work.
Thus, the checkout becomes an orphan: neither an explicit focus of the marketing team, nor a central area of interest for product and technical leads. And all the time, customers shop without buying—they show high “intent to buy” but neglect to make indeed Purchases.
To put it more simply, you may have perfected the top of the funnel, but you may very well have missed the gaps in the bottom.
But in a world of scarce resources and time, how do you get senior management to address lost conversions and abandoned checkouts as a key area of strategic focus?
The following five steps can help you fix the last click issue:
Reframe the checkout as a marketing opportunity, not a product problem
Think of checkout like this: at the top of the funnel are low-performing marketing spends, and at the bottom of the funnel are high-performing marketing spends.