E‑commerce Exit Surveys And Conversion Rates

November 15, 2005

I always wonder what the conversion rates of those e-commerce exit surveys are.

As a conversion rate raiser, I take all the surveys that are offered to me. Today, I had the opportunity to do one for PriceGrabber instead of the usual BizRate survey. I was really surprised to see how best conversion practices were ignored. In the survey, they told me to include my order number and admonished, “Invalid order numbers may cause your survey to be rejected.” (Now, who really cares about the survey, them or me?) They asked me for my email address but gave me no link to a privacy policy. And then after I hit “Submit,” they committed the ultimate forms error — they reprimanded me for not filling out a required field, but didn’t indicate which one it was. Since all information from a survey is given freely and willingly, why don’t they take what they are given? When we website owners insist on collecting information that the customer doesn’t need to complete his transaction, we only create an incentive for the customer to lie. And how does that help our data?