Lightburn

As expected, this year provided no shortage of hype around “Black Friday” or what I’ve come to call “Running with the Bulls”.  Although I personally didn’t take part in any of the madness, I did spend a lot of time staying tuned to various reports published throughout the extended weekend. I’ve done this for several years now – mostly out of curiosity. However, this year I noticed significantly more information flowing related to online sales and I think there are a couple of important things that should be pointed out.

Bouncing Black Friday

For starters, there’s no question that the lines between Black Friday and Cyber Monday are fading away as the frenzy of deal hunters expect deals both in store and online starting Friday.  According to a report published on Saturday by Coremetrics, online retailers saw some impressive gains in total visitor sessions, average order sizes and number of items purchased this year.  On the flip side of that, they also saw a significant increase in their overall bounce rates and a slide in average page views.

Souce: Coremetrics 2009 Benchmark Report (www.coremetrics.com)

The slide in page views isn’t too concerning to me as retailers have worked hard to decrease the number of pages visitors have to touch in order to accomplish their goals. More alarming is the 39% increases in bounce rates. This is a significant increase year over year and is a strong indication that site visitors are either not finding what they are looking for or are being turned off for one reason or another, such as price. With window shopping and price comparison as easy as a click, online retailers need to work extra hard to make sure they both attract and convert their visitors, and bounce rate is a key factor in measuring the success of those efforts.

Attacking Bounce Rates

Coincidently last week, I noticed online retailer BackCounty.com started publishing the prices of their competitors right on their product pages. At first this seemed crazy to me, but I quickly realized it could very well be a brilliant move on their part to reduce bounce rates and improve conversion rates.

If site visitors can see at a glance both the price of BackCountry.com as well as its competitors, those visitors have one less reason to bounce from the site. Not only that, by publishing their competitors’ prices and giving visitors direct links to those sites they are gaining valuable and otherwise unattainable insight in to whom they may be losing business.

Heck, they may even be able to raise their prices using this tactic. Say for example you landed on their site, read the product description of the item you wanted and knew it was in stock. Then you noticed that one of their competitors was say $2 or $3 lower in price. Would you jump ship? My guess is probably not. You’re there, you’re engaged and when the facts are presented to you that you are getting a competitive price your mind is set at ease and you can focus on making that purchase.  Now if you didn’t know what the price difference was, you might shop around and chances are a different retailer will get the business based on the order in which the visitor compared them.

Only BackCountry.com knows if this is working or not, but I certainly would bet that they have seen at least a small decrease in bounce rate and an improvement in conversion.  Either way, I give them credit for proactively attacking bounce rates and look forward to seeing if they continue with this program.