Despite the evidence that sales at the end of 2024 reach enough volumes to be considered the most voluminous in recent years in e-commerce, the fact is that there is still a great waste of potential in the sector, especially with regard to the low level of accessibility among the portals most used by Brazilians for shopping on the internet.
Just to give you an idea, a recent study by Biomob assigned the average 6 in an index of 0 to 10 for the main Brazilian marketplaces against the standards established by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1).
The indicator is considered a guide created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to guide websites to comply with minimum standards of digital accessibility. In practice, brands such as OLX, Americanas. Magazine Luiza, Netshoes, Carrefour. Ponto Frio, Casas Bahia, Extra and Mercado Livre were in a range between 4.5 and 9.7.
On the one hand, the good news is that despite being at different levels of execution, it was possible to find in all marketplaces the concern of ensuring accessibility in their shopping environments. Some errors still prevent adequate navigability for all audiences, but it is a fact that efforts were found to achieve this goal.
On the other hand, it is cause for concern that e-commerce sites are not yet fully adapted to the best accessibility practices. This entails a cycle of losses that affects all involved.
Just to give you an idea, another recent survey by PROCON-SP found that 69% of consumers with some type of physical disability have already faced barriers to making virtual purchases, with 17% stating that they always face difficulties and 52% sometimes.
If this scenario has as direct victims the people who were frustrated by not being able to make the transactions they would like, it is also true that websites, portals and marketplaces end up having, by table, a great loss when they fail to bill with these operations.
Perhaps this waste of sales potential is being considered irrelevant for these companies, but in practice, who is able to ensure the volume of revenue that fails to enter the vault of these companies?It is smaller or larger than what they invest in marketing campaigns to try to attract customers while ceasing to sell to a customer who has already been won?
Fortunately in some cases it seems that there is not much to achieve an acceptable level of accessibility. This is the case, for example, OLX, which scored 9.7. The OLX website presented a total of 31 accessibility practices identified. Of these, 24 were classified as acceptable, 6 required additional manual verification and only one was considered unacceptable, being level AA.
On the other hand, the most frequently found score was also the lowest, corresponding to 4.5 applied to Ponto Frio, Casas Bahia, Extra and Mercado Livre.The Lojas Americanas website had the second best result (7.5), followed closely by Magazine Luiza (7.0), Netshoes (6.7) and finally Carrefour (5.4).
Among the portals that received the lowest scores, problems were detected such as the fact that although they had a tab dedicated to the service in Libras and offer functions such as Translator for Libras and assistive features, these features were inactive during the search, displaying error messages.
In the evaluation of the portals with better ranking, positive points were detected, such as the fact that all images on the page have the necessary alternative equivalent in text. Another positive aspect was the exposure of elements with banner semantics not being contained within any element with other semantics.
Be that as it may, it seems obvious that deepening the accessibility conditions in this segment is not '''I.Ejust’ is a matter of social responsibility, inclusion and empathy.It is also a strategy of significant impact on business.
