Dive Brief:

• Ninety-percent of people have bought items online, but 58% of those people have abandoned purchases because of website bugs or a poor user interface, according to a report by SurveyMonkey emailed to Retail Dive.

• In cases where website users abandoned purchases, only 29% of them reported the existence of the site bug to the website operator. The survey was conducted online during the last week of February and polled 3,313 adults over the age of 18 living in the U.S.

• SurveyMonkey also reported that 66% of those surveyed have encountered bugs on websites and 75% of people have left websites as a result of encountering a bug.

Dive Insight:

For some website operators, finding and fixing a bug may not be a high priority, but for retailers and brands with e-commerce sites, even a minor bug can represent a lost opportunity to make a sale.

Still, companies can't fix what they don't know exists, and few site visitors report bugs. The survey further found that 68% of visitors have taken a website feedback survey, so it's not likely that the issue is lack of comfort or interest in providing feedback.

SurveyMonkey surmised that users may not be getting an opportunity — or perhaps the right opportunity at the right time — to provide useful feedback. Only 7% of those surveyed said they want to be interrupted while they are using a site to provide feedback on that site's performance, while a much larger number (48%) said they would do so by email. This all highlights the importance of retailers and brands to communicate with site users, and urge them to provide feedback on their own terms and on a regular basis.