Why Don’t People Buy? The 5 Most Common Purchase Objections In An E-commerce

And Here How To Solve Them

Your client is in your online store, browses it … but goes without buying. What happened? An objection to the sale.

At some point, the person has come across something that has made him not buy. What has been that purchase objection? How to fix it?

In this post we explain what are the 5 most common objections to purchasing in e-commerce and, most importantly, we teach you how to solve them.

From today nobody will be able to leave your online store without filling their cart. Keep reading…

What are the purchase objections?

This is very simple. We shall start with a very short definition.

A sales objection is any reason that your customer does not complete the purchase.

There can be a thousand reasons:

• The price.
• You have decided to search for more stores.
• Something has generated mistrust.
• The payment process is complex.
• Etc…

Before we start solving the most common purchase objections, we want to emphasize an idea: on a recurring basis, you should make an effort to understand why your customers buy (or not).

We already mentioned this idea to you when we talked about the conversion funnel.

Not everyone buys the same way, so it is very important that you understand what each customer has in mind at all times. This will help you to give the right answers or content at each moment to send it to the sale (this is the basic idea of Inbound Marketing ).

Extra bonuses: a very useful exercise

Put yourself in the shoes of your client and live the process of buying one of your products in full. Ideally, you should do this little exercise every “x” time.

When you pretend, ask yourself these questions:

• What difficulties do you encounter? Do you easily get to what you are looking for?
• Do you have doubts at any time?
• Where have you arrived and what route have you taken?
• Would you have abandoned the cart?
• Putting your website under the magnifying glass on a regular basis will help you to improve your conversion rate progressively.

And now we are in trouble.

How to resolve the most common purchase objections

As we told you before, there are multiple reasons why a person may not buy. Now let’s take a tour of the most common sales objection examples so you don’t get messed up by looking further.

Only with this, we assure you that your sales will go up a lot.

1. Are you targeting the right audience?

Imagine that the users who enter your online store are looking to buy oranges, while you are specialized in pears.

We have a problem, right?

SOLUTIONS

• Buyer persona: This problem is very common in businesses that start and are not clear to whom they are going or want to sell to everyone. In hyperspecialization is where you can add more value and you will not have to compete as much for the price.

• Correct segmentation in your advertising: online advertising is wonderful … if you segment well. Be careful, do not always try to sell directly. In many cases, the conversion will improve if you first convert them to subscribers and create a “link” with them.

• Good choice of keywords: do you know what are the best keywords in your sector? Choosing the wrong keywords can cause you to attract unskilled traffic, that is, people who are not interested in what you sell.

2. The price: the mother of all purchase objections in an e-commerce

Show the full price from the start.

Yes, we tell you as soon as we start because this is one of the worst mistakes you can make. All customers hate to think that they are buying something at a price and then it turns out that it is much more expensive with VAT missing.

That said, we continue. 😉

Price is hands down the toughest workhorse you deal with. Amazon, in addition to many other online stores, is there, and competing for price against it is very complicated.

Let’s see what to do.

SOLUTIONS

• Specialize: Do you remember that we mentioned before how important it is to specialize? Here you can beat Amazon. When you focus on a small niche, you understand much better your client’s needs and how you can solve them. Customers understand that they must pay more because it is a specific store.

• Customer service: be impeccable with your clients. Although we are in an online store, your customers like to feel that there are people behind that business. Have a chat, offer telephone attention, and respond quickly and well to the emails that come to you.

• Free Shipping: People are annoyed to pay for shipping, it’s like that. Evaluate the extent to which you would lower the margin by offering free shipping and measure if the conversion goes up. You can also play with free shipping from a minimum purchase amount.
• Social Proof: One store is priced slightly cheaper, while another is slightly higher, but has several positive customer reviews. Who to buy from? Many people will opt for option B as it will generate more confidence. This point is very important in order to sell more with e-commerce.

3. Your product is not understood

Or the customer doesn’t see how your article will help him.

Think that an online customer needs to be very clear about the real benefit of what they are going to get. Even if you offer free shipping on return, many people will back down from the laziness of having to do the return shipping.

SOLUTIONS

• Copywriting: essential for your product sheets. Copywriting is writing to sell. It is important that you show the benefits and not the features or that you play storytelling so that customers can already image your article.

• Videos: what better way to show how your product works than with a video where you appear using it? Video marketing is still a must for any online store.

• Images: in line with the above. Any format that helps to better display your product is welcome. The images are still very powerful for clothing. Don’t forget to show details (for example, showing the texture is important to convey smoothness).

4. Can’t find what you were looking for

Has it ever happened to you that you come to an online store and is it chaos?

You try to browse the article categories, but you find it very difficult to understand what to select to see what you are looking for.

This is an e-commerce classic. And it is that stores that handle many types of products, find it very difficult to classify clearly.

SOLUTIONS

• A study of keywords: to know how to classify your products, you first need to know how customers search for them. Think of running pants, what would you call it? Trousers? Mesh? Legging ?? You need to check beforehand how your customers search for your articles before classifying (there’s also no need to keep an eye on the competition).

• Good web architecture: the previous point leads us to this one. The study of keywords will guide you on the architecture that your website should have. Try that the menu of your store is guiding the person (in some sectors it is a good idea to segment, initially, between men, women, or children).

• A professional search engine: a search engine is that clerk who helps customers in a physical store and suggests items according to what they ask.

5. “I was just looking”

Who has never said that excuse in a store? 😉

However, although the phrase is that, what we really mean is:

“I’m only looking. If I see something that interests me, I’ll let you know.”

There is interest in buying (if not, you would not be in the store), but it is possible that that consumer (lead in the online case) is not yet ready to buy.

Let’s see what to do to avoid losing that customer.

SOLUTION

• Remarketing: we “chase” the customer with ads through the web so that they remember that they were seeing that product recently.

• Make him a subscriber so that he goes through the funnel: that person who was just looking leaves your store. To return to? We don’t know, but what is clear is that you cannot allow him to leave and you cannot contact him anymore. That is why it is so important that you leave your information. So you can send him emails with which to strengthen his confidence and make him see the benefits of your products.

With everything we have just explained in this post, you have plenty of work to do to put a stop to the purchase objections in your e-commerce store.

If you have any comment/advice on this post or on any other purchase objections we didn’t cover, please feel free to use the comments box below.

——————————————————————————————————————–

About Author: Vikram Rana is Marketing Manager at LiftnGift and has served as the Head of Conversion Marketing at Planet Web Solution. He’s an expert in inbound marketing and lead generation.