Why the ‘last click’ in e-commerce matters – and how to get it right – TechCrunch

what is this The biggest and most obvious problem with e-commerce retailers?

check out. By that, I mean customers who find their way to a retailer’s digital home, decide to buy an item, add the item to the cart, and press checkout—to end the final part of the transaction.

This may seem like a small issue, but in reality, it’s a huge expense for retailers — billions of dollars by some industry estimates. However, regardless of the size of the checkout problem, fixing the problem ends up being the last item on many to-do lists.

This is partly because check withdrawal is at the bottom. At the top of the funnel are the big-ticket, flashy items: ad campaigns, paid traffic, product-market fit, media relations, and everything else that seems important.

Companies spend time, money and energy getting people in the door, building meaningful products and services, and keeping those people in the e-commerce ecosystem. Generally, marketing teams handle many of the aforementioned.

At the core is the technical and product teams and usually the person responsible for the payment infrastructure. Those people tend to rank. That is Things work – not necessarily how all right They work.

Therefore, checkout becomes an orphan: not a clear focus of the marketing team, or a key area of ​​interest for product and technical leaders. And all the while, customers shop without buying – they show a high “intention to buy” but are reluctant to do so. common sense Purchases.

Simply put: you may have met the top of the fund, but you may well have missed the gaps underneath.

But in a resource-constrained and short-term environment, how can senior leadership rally around lost change and bad check issuance as a key area of ​​strategic focus?

The following five steps can help you fix the “last click” problem:

Reframe the checkout as a marketing opportunity, not a product problem

Think of a check like this: the top of the fund is the cost of the underperforming market, and the bottom of the fund is the cost of the high performing market.