Why small e-commerce, and even larger e-commerce retailers are losing business

E-Commerce retailers are losing their customers because of this one critical mistake

I have long wondered why so many small e-commerce retailers want to keep this aspect of their business in house. It is a headache, and it causes a large amount of frustration among buyers. Long delays between buying and the ship date, large shipping costs, difficult to us web sites all add up to lost customers. 

This article outlines the problem very well. It even answers the question, albeit unknowingly. It wants you to buy a report, but save your money and follow my free advice.

"It's clear that U.S. consumers have little to no desire to manually enter all of their information, so e-commerce retailers need to figure out a way to streamline this process for them. Amazon's 1-Click Ordering, for example, allows a shopper to use their saved payment and shipping information to literally make a purchase with one click of a button.

E-commerce retailers must adjust their approach in order to avoid leaving potentially billions of dollars on the table, most of which is easily recoverable with a few tweaks to the checkout process. But what steps can they take?"

There, boys, is your answer, clear as day, but unseen by the author. Amazon. Yes, Amazon. The Amazon Marketplace allows third party vendors to sell through the Amazon web site, the products can be warehoused at the business, or Amazon will provide warehousing, and shipping services. Regardless, wherever the product ships from, the purchase is via Amazon's one click purchase system, which eliminated the customer baulk at the cart problem. 

Frankly, I can't imagine not utilizing the entire Amazon opportunity to warehouse, process, and ship the product with free Prime shipping, but perhaps the businesses believe they can do this better or make more profit holding onto this last leg of the process. I would guess they simply give up a large number of sales, with people buying the product, or a similar product through Amazon with Prime shipping.

When you realize that the Amazon satisfaction rate bumps along at a point or two below 100%, it's a wonder even large e-commerce retailers don't use Amazons shipping, payment, and Prime services. I expect we will see more of this over the next few years. This year we saw a distinct jump in online sales, as shoppers moved away from brick and mortar stores. I suggest this will continue, and we should see more specialty retailers partnering with Amazon to perform the one click buying, warehousing, handling, and shipping, even Prime shipping end of the transaction. 

The Internet has turned retailing on its head by requiring extremely high standards of customer satisfaction. Today Amazon provides those levels of satisfaction.