Shoppers abandon websites for these reasons …

E-commerce retailers need to avoid a few critical site issues.

Shoppers abandon an average of five online purchases a year due to poor e-commerce sites, according to a survey of 6,000 online shoppers in the U.S. and Europe from content management system provider Storyblok,  Eight percent of survey respondents abandon more than 10 online purchases a year.

In addition, 42% of respondents say they decide whether to stay on or leave a website within 10 seconds, and another 20% make that decision within five seconds. When asked their main reasons for leaving an e-commerce website, the top three reasons were:

• Limited payment options (37%).
• Poor navigation or layout (37%).
• Slow loading speeds (33%).

In positive results, 60% of respondents said that e-commerce sites are getting better, with only 5% saying the experience is worse.

The survey also asked about factors that affect purchasing decisions. More than half of respondents (56%) said recommendations from friends and family are the biggest influence on their purchasing decisions. Almost half (48%) of U.S. respondents said seeing a product on social media is an important factor, compared to a little more than one-third (35%) of respondents in Europe. Marketing emails and online ads had the least influence.

The survey also asked respondents whether virtual or augmented reality experiences would encourage them to make purchases - 42% overall said yes (rising to 57% for U.S. respondents), 37% said no, and 21% were unsure. Only 27% of respondents said extra website features such as chatbots are important.

Other interesting results include:

• Close to one in four (23%) respondents plan to make more Christmas present purchases online this year and 51% will make the same amount as in 2021 – 19% will make fewer and only 7% intend to make no holiday purchases online. Supply chain issues and preference for the in-store experience were the top concerns of respondents making fewer online holiday purchases.
• More than four in 10 (42%) U.S. respondents said that on at least one occasion they have been too embarrassed to say where they purchased a product from because the website was so poorly designed, compared to only 18% of European respondents.

[Read more: eBay: Online holiday spending will hold steady]

"Consumers want easy-to-navigate, intuitively designed, and fast-loading websites,” said Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok, “However, a lot of e-commerce websites are falling short. Five purchases per shopper in missed sales may not seem like a lot, but when you scale this up to the number of potential new customers that businesses are missing out on, it becomes a very significant amount of money.

Storyblok conducted a survey of 6,000 consumers with OnePoll between Nov. 24-30, 2022.