Understand Your Website Visitor’s Habits & Then Bowl Them Over

With household budgets still under pressure and shoppers more willing than ever to shop around for the best deal, conversion rates are hard-won for most eCommerce brands. Recent research puts the number of online shoppers who compare prices across multiple sites before buying at somewhere around 7 in 10, so the question isn’t whether your visitors are price-checking elsewhere, it’s what you do about it before they leave to find out.

Do The Price Matching For Them!

Currys understand how customers use their website, and when a customer searches Google for a product and clicks through to a Currys product page (organic or paid), they immediately see the product and price.

Following some reading about specs and so on, a user will weigh up the options of whether to buy or not. Before the ‘add to basket’ button is pressed, a money-conscious user will want to see how much the product is going for on other websites, to be sure they’re getting the best price.

After all, if this is a commodity product, then surely there will be similar prices listed from other online retailers.

What Do They Do?

When a user highlights and copies the product title (so they can go and paste it into a search engine to hunt for cheaper deals) this is where the magic happens. A pop-up appears confirming Currys will price match that item against any other UK retailer, online or in-store. With a click it opens the full Price Promise details in a new tab, all without leaving the original page which stays open. The shopper then knows that they can buy the item from Currys (a respected and trusted retailer), and even if they find the item cheaper elsewhere over the next 7 days, they can get the difference refunded.

Currys expect it, because they’ve understood the habits of their users.

Now To Be Bowled Over

Rather than a live, dynamic competitor price table appearing on the page itself (which is what Currys used to have), the pop-up directs shoppers to Currys’ Price Promise page, which spells out the guarantee in plain terms. If you find the same product cheaper elsewhere, in-store or online in the UK, Currys will match it, up to seven days after you buy.

That’s arguably a simpler, lower-maintenance version of the original live competitor pricing table and requires less web resources to manage. Rather than committing to keep a per-product price comparison constantly up to date (which is a lot of ongoing work to get right), Currys make a clear, standing promise and let shoppers do the honours of finding a lower price if one exists. It’s still built on the same insight though, as they know shoppers copy the product name to go check elsewhere, and they intercept that exact moment with reassurance rather than letting the shopper leave to compare unassisted.

What’s to Swipe & Deploy?

With shoppers comparing more competitively than ever, you need to be aware of your direct competitors’ pricing as well as their delivery fees. Providing free delivery could sway it. Unexpected delivery costs at checkout remain one of the single biggest reasons carts get abandoned, so being upfront about them works in your favour, not against it.

What about your returns policy, or anything else that’s unique to your online sales process? If there’s value in what you include, make sure to include it when you compare yourself with competitors. Small things can change the balance, even when they’re not price related, things that provide greater convenience, like flexible collection points, count too.

Could you apply a similar approach to your eCommerce website? Could you capture more customers who might otherwise leave your site to price match elsewhere?

That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #1. Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web.

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