Despite the eager shoppers and the predictions of a big holiday season, there is bad news for online retailers: the e-commerce industry is losing billions of dollars in potential sales. Shoppers want to purchase online, but many sites make it too hard to buy.

To gain the most from the holiday season, sites must pursue a simple strategy: improve the customer experience. Improving the customer experience can yield an additional $8 billion in North American sales, and $14 billion in worldwide online sales this holiday season.

According to Gartner Group projections, worldwide online revenues for the holiday season will be $19.5 billion.

In our consumer tests of major sites across key holiday categories, we found that 43% of buying attempts failed. These findings suggest that the $19.5 billion represent only 57% of potential sales this holiday season.

Lost sales due to poor customer experience thus total more than $14 billion: · $34.2 billion － $19.5 billion=$14.7 billion.

It is worth noting that our $14 billion does not include future losses due to poor experience this holiday season. Millions of consumers will shop online for the first time this holiday season. If they have a good experience, they are likely to continue shopping on their favorite sites in the future. If they have a bad experience, they will likely never return to the sites where they were unable to buy(if indeed they return to shop online at all).The actual losses due to poor customer experience may thus be significantly higher than our $14 billion estimate.

In our tests, problems with the checkout process were the greatest cause of failed purchase attempts. More than 40% of failures were due to difficulty with checkout. Customers had found a product they wanted, added it to their cart and decided to place an order. They were ready to buy and wanted to pay. Unfortunately, the checkout process was too difficult and made it impossible for them to buy.

There were several different types of problems that arose in the checkout process.The most important lesson is that poor checkout experience will cost the industry billions in holiday sales.

1.Compared with last year's holiday sales, this year's will be ______.

A. lower B. twice lower

C. higher D. twice higher

2.Forrester Research, Jupiter and Gartner Group all suggest that in 2000 ______.

A. holiday sales for e-commerce sites in every part of the world will increase a lot

B. holiday sales for e-commerce sites in every part of the world will decrease a lot

C. holiday sales for e-commerce sites in some parts of the world will increase a lot

D. holiday sales for e-commerce sites in some parts of the world will decrease a lot

3.By shopping online, people can avoid ______.

A. traffic jams B. crowds

C. getting up early D. both A and B

4.It is implied by the author that ______.

A. it is difficult to buy things on some sites

B. it is difficult to buy things on all sites

C. it is easy to buy things on all sites

D. it is easy to buy things on few sites