Shoppers would rather sit in a flight’s middle seat than create another store account

All brands want lifetime customers—but what does building those lasting relationships take? For an answer, we partnered up with YouGov, a global market research and data analytics firm. We surveyed 994 U.S. adults to understand what they were looking for from online retailers. What would make them stay, and what are they seeking in their shopping experience?&nbsp;We’ve put together those findings into a report,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bolt.com/lifetime-customer-report">How To Create Lifetime Customers</a>, and the insights are illuminating.<h2>1. Consumers loathe the maze and haze of multiple logins and passwords</h2>Exactly how annoying is it to manage various logins at various sites where consumers shop?&nbsp;Roughly half of people (44%) would rather sit in the middle seat of an airplane than keep track of all their online shopping accounts and passwords. Creating accounts on multiple sites is a visceral, visible annoyance—and it’s also costly to both the shoppers and merchants.&nbsp;When consumers encounter a moment of friction or inconvenience—like having to fill in the same form they’ve filled in dozens of times before—they end their shopping experience. Maybe they add to cart, but don’t move forward. Maybe they browse, but don’t buy.&nbsp;By eliminating that gray area between when a customer adds something to cart and actually purchases, with a one-click checkout you can create conversions where there would typically be drop offs. End that friction, and you could earn a customer.Many retailers consider the account creation process from their own perspective—but not from the shoppers' point of view. Account creation makes perfect sense for retailers because it gives them access to valuable first-party data. However, customers typically create online store accounts for other reasons like exclusive discounts, order tracking, etc. In fact,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bolt.com/lifetime-customer-report#anchor-1">62% of those surveyed</a> would prefer signing up for one account and being able to use it to shop everywhere online.&nbsp;So if retailers aren’t careful, a well-intended tool can become a point of inconvenience for shoppers like creating yet another online store login or the one that we’re all too familiar with, hitting that reset password button on the account login page.&nbsp;This is why merchants should think critically about how they get shoppers to create customer accounts. Be creative with it, explore products and services that <a href="https://www.bolt.com/conversions">eliminate the friction</a> as much as possible, and even offer new customer exclusive discounts.&nbsp;A tool for retailers that potentially creates aggravation for customers is all the more reason for merchants to consider how they’re priming customers to make accounts—and to look for products and services that reduce the friction in that process as much as possible.<h2>2. Online merchants are competing against … the entire internet&nbsp;</h2>As a merchant, it’s tempting to think of ecommerce as a battle of the brands—one online store trying to win market share against another store, and so on. But that’s not how consumers see it.&nbsp;In our survey, we asked about tab behavior—meaning, how many tabs are open on a given shopper’s web browser. The results:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bolt.com/lifetime-customer-report#anchor-2">More than half</a> (51%) of shoppers have greater than 2 tabs open when shopping online, and 19% of shoppers have more than 6 tabs open when shopping online.As a retailer, that means your website is not only competing for attention against the websites of other retailers, but also against the sites of social networks, media portals, Zoom calls, YouTube videos, ChatGPT questions, and everything else that shoppers might be doing at the same time.&nbsp;We’ve dubbed these shoppers “multi-tabsters,” and understanding them can be key to capturing their attention, improving conversion, and building lifelong customer relationships.&nbsp;One suggestion that emerges from this finding: Make it simple for consumers to shop where they are, regardless of device, and use more robust metrics to account for the multiple visits that may yield a sale.&nbsp;Consider the chain of actions that lead up to a conversion: A multi-tabster might start browsing on a laptop and return to your site later on their phone. While the mushrooming tabs may distract them on their laptop, they may be less tab-hungry on their phone. Does that mean the desktop browsing was inconsequential? No, because that may have been their first look at your product, or the moment when they could see your product photos on a bigger screen.&nbsp;Both the mobile&nbsp;and&nbsp;desktop interaction worked in harmony, and that’s why multi-tabsters and multi-platform users should lead retailers to think more carefully about when and how conversion happens—and to not assume a metric like “conversions per visit” is uniform across device types.<h2>3. Discounts matter—even more than you might think&nbsp;</h2>It’s not surprising to learn that offering a discount can compel consumers to buy.&nbsp;What surprised us was just how much of a difference even a simple discount code can make: 63% of the people we surveyed shared that a discount code from a brand would help them complete a purchase they weren’t fully committed to beforehand.That’s almost two-thirds of people, both those who reported themselves as more price conscious and those who did not, who said a simple code could yield a sale.&nbsp;Discount codes aren’t new technology, of course. But what this data point reveals is how even the simplest ingredients can make a big impact on conversion.&nbsp;This isn’t necessarily an argument to go discount-code crazy, but it is a signal to not ignore price sensitivity. Especially in the current economic environment.&nbsp;Consumers are pulling back and some categories have noticed big declines in consumer spending. In the face of this climate, online retailers need to be hyper-aware of opportunities to improve conversion by offering discounts on individual items or site-wide. As with the other findings from this study, retailers should ensure discounts are easy to use so they don’t inadvertently introduce more friction into the shopping experience.&nbsp;<h2>Building customers for life&nbsp;</h2>We’ve built Bolt to help merchants create happy customers that come back to shop over and over again. This includes One-Click Checkout that boosts <a href="https://www.bolt.com/conversions">conversions</a>, a 100% <a href="https://www.bolt.com/fraud">fraud protection</a> tool, and features to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bolt.com/loyalty">increase customer loyalty</a>. Get started with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bolt.com/contact-sales">Bolt today</a>.&nbsp;