By Chemi Katz, Namogoo
With holiday shopping season nearly upon us, now is the time to make any last-minute tweaks to your e-Commerce strategy. For most online retailers, this means ensuring the customer journey has been optimized to maximize conversions and minimize cart abandonment.
Customers personas perfected? Check.
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Seamless checkout experience crafted? Check.
Online support staff ready? Check.
Customer browsers free of Digital Malware? Wait, what?
What if I told you that despite all your hard work, a quarter of your customers aren’t experiencing the customer journey like you intended? Think it can’t happen to you? Think again. A recent assessment of 500 million web site sessions across a range of retail sectors during a six-month period (January to June 2017) found that between 15% to 25% of sessions expose users to unauthorized ads, sending them to competitors. Further, projections based on past years’ data suggest that this number is expected to surge to between 25% to 30% during peak season. This can add up to $2.1 billion in lost revenue for retailers over the holidays.
Stealing Your Holiday Cheer
The unauthorized ads injected by Digital Malware take many forms — pop-ups, banner ads and competitor product recommendations, to name a few. It hurts your conversion rates, either by creating a bad customer experience that forces shoppers to abandon their cart or by presenting competing product ads at lower prices, luring them away. So, a shopper who is ready to check out on your site might be served an advertisement for the same or similar items for 25% less at a competing retailer.
And the worst part? Your IT department doesn’t even know this is happening. No matter how good they are at monitoring for digital intrusions, there’s no way they can see this shady activity if it’s not happening on your servers.
The problem begins when consumers inadvertently and unknowingly download malware through bad browser extensions, free software bundles, and even by simply using a free, unsecured WiFi network. Once this Grinch sneaks onto the end user’s device, it manifests as a barrage of unwanted distractions across web sites they visit — including yours. Even more scary? The customer may not know that the Digital Malware is on their device, leading them to think that your site is serving unsavory ads and pop-ups or delivering an unsatisfactory experience that could damage your brand.
Rejoice In The Holiday Season
What can retailers do to save their holiday revenue? Luckily, it doesn’t involve strapping antlers to a dog. You can be the Cindy Lou Who and help ensure that your company’s revenues aren’t three times too small this holiday season.
As a first step, retailers should look at their site experience on a browser infected with digital malware to see what a fourth of their customers are experiencing. It can be quite surprising, since this isn’t the view they normally have, and it will help in understanding exactly how malware is stealing away the customers you worked so hard to acquire.
The next step is to get a handle on the potential impact on holiday revenues — what percentage of page views include unauthorized ads, what percentage are pointing to related products from competitors and which pages are more likely to include these ads.
By understanding the problem, the scale and scope, and the fact that traditional digital intrusion software cannot detect malware on customer devices, you can take the first step toward recovering lost revenue, ensuring your customers have the best possible shopping experience this holiday season.
Chemi Katz is the co-founder and CEO of Namogoo. With over 17 years of experience in the security, commerce and advertising spaces, Katz is an experienced visionary and a serial entrepreneur regarded for building disruptive technologies.
