When customers forget their passwords, business suffers
WASHINGTON — A lot of money goes unspent in the online world for a simple reason: Shoppers can’t remember their passwords.
The average person is registered to 90 online accounts requiring passwords, and the number keeps growing. Few people remember so many passwords.
“About a third of online purchases are abandoned at checkout because consumers cannot remember their passwords,” a study conducted jointly by MasterCard and the University of Oxford said last week.
Experts in electronic commerce say major online vendors stand to lose a lot of shoppers if they don’t take corrective action.
“For most sites, it would be a multimillion-dollar loss, if not higher,” said Christian Holst, a co-founder of Baymard Institute, an independent research entity in Frederiksberg, Denmark, that conducts large-scale tests on the usability of e-commerce sites.
Passwords are only part of the problem, but a major one. Consumers just can’t remember them all, and most online vendors, banks, airlines and others require them. So 51 percent of people use similar passwords over and over, the study found.
“They are variations of passwords they’ve used for many years. They keep changing the number (at the end) of the password from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, or move through different special characters,” said Ryan Wilk, vice president of customer success at NuData Security, a Vancouver firm that helps companies identify online users based on passive biometrics and behavioral analytics.
“Quite often, people will use the same variation of a similar password across the board and will modify that password’s strength based on the requirements of a site,” Wilk said.
“Twenty-one percent of users forget passwords after 2 weeks, and 25 percent forget one password at least once a day,” the study found.
When online shoppers get into the digital checkout funnel of an e-commerce site but then give up because of a roadblock, it is called “cart abandonment.”
It doesn’t take much for users to walk away from their e-shopping carts. Online sites routinely have different requirements for passwords. Some demand that they be a certain length. Others require alphanumeric combinations. Still others ask for a symbol to be included.
It is all in the name of security. Online businesses don’t want to deal with fraudsters. And consumers don’t want their credit card data stolen from businesses by hackers.
So users come up with coping strategies. Some shoppers simply hit password reset. But that can bring other problems.
“Some users will start to get impatient after just one or two minutes,” Holst said. “Users are extremely impatient online.”
At some sites, those who reset passwords must wait to receive an email, and sometimes they have to reply to another confirmation email.
“What we’re asking them to do is to stare at the screen for several minutes. One or two minutes will feel like five minutes,” he said. $1,541,807 Ronald F. Bates CD DG Ashville LLC