Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
There is a good reason why brick-and-mortar retailers spend a lot of time and effort on their counter displays and store windows. Their goal is to provide their customers with as much visual content as possible to entice them to buy their merchandise. The same principle holds true for online retailers. A recent study by international e-commerce consulting firm Episerver demonstrates just how important the content of a website is to convince visitors to become customers.
Episerver surveyed 1,112 consumers who had made an online purchase within the past year. The company found that 98% of the respondents had not made a purchase on at least one of the sites they visited due to incomplete or incorrect content. When aggregated across all sites visited, a percentage breakdown of the specific reasons for not making a purchase was price concerns (65%), difficult-to-navigate website (42%), found a product that better suited needs elsewhere (39%), difficult check-out process (34%), slow loading website (29%), incomplete content (21%), incorrect content (14%) and non-personalized shopping experience (4%).
Another problem noted by the study was inconsistent customer expectation based on website content, with 37% of the respondents stating they had received a product that looked different from the product they saw online. Also, 27% of the respondents said they had received a product that did not match the description on the website.
These inconsistent expectations also had a significant financial impact on the retailers, with 48% of the respondents saying they had returned a product that had not met their expectations. The study noted that returns cost retailers billions and that the amount is expected to increase as the volume of online sales continues to increase.
The study also found that 92% of the respondents visited a website for the first time for reasons other than to make a purchase. About 45% said that they visited a website to search for products and learn more about them, 26% visited to make a price comparison, and 11% were looking for more information about a retailer. Only 9% said they made their first visit to a website specifically to make a purchase.
The study concluded that online retailers needed to spend more time concentrating on website content and the quality of the interactions consumers had with their site.
Commenting on the study, Ed Kennedy, Episerver’s senior director of commerce, said: “Our study shows consumers really care about content when shopping online, not only the quality and accuracy but also how it’s delivered to them. Complete and accurate content is now table stakes, and brands looking to go above and beyond must consider personalization.
“What shoppers see on a website or mobile app, and how it is delivered to them, can make or break their final decision to make a purchase. Consumers expect the content they’re shown to be relevant, accurate, and, increasingly, customized to their preferences and location. To compete in 2017, strong content is no longer negotiable.”
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026
A Notification List Is Not a Team
3 min read In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years
James Barnes
February 11, 2026
Alert Noise Isn’t an Accident — It’s a Design Decision
3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.
James Barnes
February 4, 2026
The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most
4 min read In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already
James Barnes
January 28, 2026