Online retailers are complaining about low conversion rates all the time. In this post I will explain the reasons why next.co.uk lost a sale worth £100, how you can avoid making the same mistake and who got the order instead.

The story: on Saturday I decided to do some shopping ( a belt and branded underwear) which I found on Next website and as I liked the products I went first to the Next store in Windsor. Unfortunately, none of the products I found on their website were on display in their off line store so I decided to order online instead, which didn’t bother me at all.

Firstly I added the belt to my basket and then I went to the underwear section. I liked the selection of Armani, Calvin Klein, DKNY  and I was ready to purchase 5 pieces of branded underwear worth over £100, but I didn’t!

And here I will explain why, so you can learn why you might be needlessly loosing sales.

1. the selection of underwear was good and I was ready to buy. Price of around £20 per piece was acceptable to me.

2. I started with Armani underwear. The underwear came in 3 different colours. The picture available was showing the green underwear (as below) only. The other 2 options were black and white. So I selected white first to see what it looks like. And guess what, the picture didn’t change, still showing the green underwear. Tried everything, but there was no way to see the product in the different colour.

I checked other branded underwear to see if was only some sort of mistake on that product, but it wasn’t. There was only one product picture available in one colour for all other products.

So I gave up, purchased the belt only, which arrived the very next day and decided to buy the underwear from becheeky.com instead, as they had exactly the same underwear, for the same prices, but I could see what the underwear looks like in different colours.

This was the only reason I didn’t purchase it from Next.co.uk. I couldn’t see the goods in different colours prior to the purchase.

Conclusion:If I could see the colour options of the product prior the purchase then instead of placing an order with next.co.uk for £18 I would place an order worth over £118. So next.co.uk lost £100 in revenue just from me.

Little calculation:Just imagine, that 1,000 of their visitors decide not to purchase from them for similar reasons. How much next.co.uk would loose per year?

1,000 visitors per month x £100 in lost revenue = £1 00,000 per month lost in revenue. £100,000 x 12 months = £1,2 million lost in revenue a year.

So what could next.co.uk do with an additional revenue of £1,2 million a year?

1. hire extra marketing team
2. spend more money on advertising
3. or have their site gold plated

What’s the solution to their problem?

1. Solution 1 – no cost involved – display each colour variation as an individual product
2. Solution 2 – cost involved- use colour swatches to show product in different colour like for example on landsend.com

This isn’t a problem unique to the Next website only, virtually any website has some conversion problems. If you would like to find out what is stopping your website from converting more visitors then call us free on 0800 756 6761 to book your free website inspection service.

PS: Who took the order instead? – becheeky.com. (I am not affiliated with becheeky.com website in any way)