Access &: Why Creating an Accessible E-commerce Experience Matters (16th May 2024)
Your fortnightly newsletter bringing you the why and how of accessibility in business.
Access & is your why- Focusing on accessibility and a trending topic/interesting industry/timely conversation.
Access & Actions is your how- Following 2 weeks later with tasks, activities, conversation starters, stats to take to leadership and things you can implement the very same day.
because it’s great to have a conversation, but I know you’re looking for something more.
The Untapped Advantage
Why Creating a Caring E-commerce Experience Counts.
The digital revolution has ushered in a golden age for e-commerce. Online stores transcend geographical boundaries, with huge potential to reach a wider, global audience with a single click.
But turns out, it’s not just a device and an internet connection everyone needs.
If you build it, they WILL come... especially if they can actually navigate your website!
So what is the cost to your business if ‘they’ can’t?
73% of disabled people in the UK are unable to complete basic transactions on more than a quarter of the websites they visit (Click-Away Pound).
Companies without accessible sites are losing $6.9 billion a year to competitors whose sites are accessible (US Department of Commerce).
It’s not just disabled people who would benefit from accessibility. An improved user experience is for all people.
As website accessibility advocate Clive Loseby, says in his TED Talk, The Internet's Accessibility Problem — and How To Fix It, “Most countries around the world have anti-discrimination laws and websites fall under these laws, however, for me, it’s not about complying with the law.
It’s about becoming more inclusive and welcoming to everyone regardless of ability or disability.
Disabled people have money to spend on your goods and services, and if they can’t spend it with you, they’ll go spend with somebody else.”
Don't leave money on the table. It's good business to make your e-commerce platform for everyone!
The Heart Of It
Happy Shoppers, Happy Business.
Imagine a customer excited to browse your online store, only to be met with barriers that prevent them from completing a purchase. This is the reality for many disabled people who navigate inaccessible e-commerce platforms.
Clear and concise language can be easier to understand for everyone, including people with learning disabilities or those who don’t speak the language you’re writing in as their first language.
Other reasons e-commerce accessibility might want to be at the top of your list:
Brand reputation is everything.
Consumers are driven by values today. 47% of respondents will stop or reduce purchasing from companies that go back on their promises to address social or environmental issues (Porter Novelli Purpose Priorities Report 2023).
Are you demonstrating your commitment to social responsibility and inclusion?
Without accessibility, there isn’t optimal customer satisfaction.
You want customers who are more likely to return and recommend your business to others.
But 82% of people said they would often return and spend more with a company that provides an accessible online experience (Click-Away Pound).
So it makes sense there are reduced bounce rates too.
A 2019 McKinsey report cites a study by Click-Away Pound stated that 73% of disabled people in the UK abandon websites due to accessibility issues.
Is your website the Upside Down World of e-commerce (reference for the Stranger Things fans there)? How many people are finding another brand they prefer to buy from instead?
Enhanced SEO improves your reach.
Many accessibility features, like clear headings, proper code structure, alt text and navigation align with best practices for search engines (like Google), making your website easier for search engines to crawl and understand.
This can potentially improve your website's ranking and visibility in search results.
Reduced legal risk is always a good thing.
In many countries (including the UK!), there are laws and regulations that mandate accessibility for websites such as the WCAG Law in the UK.
What’s really the heart of it then?
The smoother your customer’s e-commerce experience, the more trust you build, and the more sales you make.
The Inner(vation) Circle
Hear from the voices shaping tomorrow, today.
The case for disability-inclusive e-commerce by Caroline Desrosiers, Founder of Scribely.
E-commerce brands extensively utilise visuals to engage online shoppers, with product pages typically featuring titles, a variety of images, videos, customer reviews, and detailed specifications. Everything on this page is designed to “sell” the product and keep customers wanting to stay and shop for more stuff they need without the help of a sales associate. If a customer has made it to the product page, that means they're pretty interested in potentially buying a product.
Images and videos are a critical part of making a sale online. But they only work if a customer can both see and hear the media- especially impacting customers with vision and hearing impairments. Many websites still publish product images without descriptions and videos without captions, creating significant barriers for these customers. This oversight can lead to increased frustration and abandoned carts, as the shopping experience becomes unnecessarily challenging.
In a survey conducted by Fable, 50% of Disabled consumers shop online weekly and 6% shop online daily. This means Disabled consumers are shopping online more than twice as often with 22% of general consumers shopping online at least once a week (Cloudwards). This demographic represents a substantial market segment that e-commerce businesses cannot afford to ignore.
Yet, the industry's track record on web accessibility on product pages is lacking. The WebAIM Million 2024 report highlights that 54.5% of the top million homepages are missing alt text, suggesting a potentially worse scenario for product-specific pages.
For GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) 2024, Scribely collected data on the top 45 e-commerce businesses across categories, from fashion and gaming to beauty and electronics. Instead of looking at homepages, we looked at product pages and the customer journeys that take them there.
For each e-commerce business, we looked at product images and videos on three new or featured product pages.
For images, we found that only 1 out of 45 of the sites had meaningful and descriptive alt text. This means that 98% of the top e-commerce businesses have inaccessible product pages due to missing, inaccurate, or incomplete alt text.
For videos, the numbers were not as bad as images but not great either. 46% of videos had captions, 9% had transcripts (all non-descriptive), and 2% had audio descriptions.
So, the accessibility of product pages at the point of purchase needs improvement. But what about the customer journeys to get there? We decided to track three different types of customers:
“The explorer” This is a customer who didn’t know they were shopping but then stumble across a product on social media and want to check it out.
“The evaluator” In this case, the customer knows what they want to buy and is exploring a few brands to find the best option for them.
“The opportunist” This is a customer who responds to a sponsored or remarketed ad. You know, those ads that follow you around the web and remind you to buy stuff.
What we found was that, across the board, internal and external sites are covered with missing, inaccurate, and incomplete alt text that lead to product pages that have the same.
Accessibility barriers are a lose-lose situation. Disabled shoppers lose shopping options and choice, companies lose not only sales and revenue, but also customers who aren’t likely to return to their sites. Accessibility is an opportunity to grow and reach more customers, to demonstrate action and progress to loyal online shoppers.
This doesn’t mean e-commerce businesses need to make every product page accessible right away. There are a lot of inaccessible pages out there. My call to action is for e-commerce companies to focus on the future and establish born-accessible workflows for new products moving forward for a more inclusive and welcome online shopping experience.
Keep an eye out for Access & Actions, we will share Scribleys report when it’s published!
Up To Date?
This month’s top need-to-know news.
Join me on 18th June for an online lunch and learn on using Social Media for Advocacy, as part of Sounddelivery Media’s Festival of Learning. A two week long series of online talks and panel discussions on amplifying the voices of people with lived experience, leveraging the media to get your message out there.
Did you know there’s new EU legislation coming in? Even if your company isn’t registered in the EU but you operate within it- you need to know about this: WCAG Law: Understanding the Updated Version in a UK Context — Moleworks Solutions.
Accessibility for disabled customers is on the UK government’s radar. A report, “Accessibility of products and services to disabled people”, was published in March discussing The Disability Action Plan, disabled people’s spending power and website accessibility. “The Disability Action Plan calls on the Disability Unit to publish research into the accessibility of private sector products and services in spring 2024 and to improve its understanding of the barriers disabled consumers face.”
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