Despite indications that sales at the end of 2024 will reach volumes sufficient to be considered the highest in recent years in e-commerce, the fact is that there is still a great waste of potential in the sector, mainly regarding the low level of accessibility among the portals most used by Brazilians to make purchases online.
Just to give you an idea, a recent study conducted by Biomob assigned an average score of 6 on a scale of 0 to 10 to the main Brazilian marketplaces, compared to 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 in complying with minimum digital accessibility standards. In practice, brands such as OLX, Americanas, Magazine Luiza, Netshoes, Carrefour, Ponto Frio, Casas Bahia, Extra, and Mercado Livre fell within a range of 4.5 to 9.7.
On the one hand, the good news is that despite being at different levels of implementation, all marketplaces showed a concern for ensuring accessibility in their shopping environments. Some errors still prevent adequate navigation for all audiences, but it is a fact that efforts are being made to achieve this goal.
On the other hand, it is a cause for concern that e-commerce websites are not yet fully adapted to accessibility best practices. This leads to a cycle of losses that affects everyone involved.
Just to give you an idea, another recent survey conducted by PROCON-SP found that 69% of consumers with some type of physical disability have faced barriers to making online purchases, with 17% stating that they always face difficulties and 52% sometimes.
While this scenario directly affects people who are frustrated by not being able to complete the transactions they wanted, it's also true that websites, portals, and marketplaces end up suffering significant losses by failing to generate revenue from these operations.
Perhaps this wasted sales potential is considered irrelevant by these companies, but in practice, who can guarantee the volume of revenue that fails to enter their coffers? Is it less or more than what they invest in marketing campaigns to try to attract customers while failing to sell to a customer they have already won over?
Fortunately, in some cases it seems that we are not far from reaching an acceptable level of accessibility. This is the case, for example, with OLX, which scored 9.7. The OLX website presented a total of 31 identified accessibility practices. Of these, 24 were classified as acceptable, 6 require additional manual verification, and only one was considered unacceptable, being at 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), closely followed 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, despite having a tab dedicated to service in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) and offering functions such as a Libras Translator and assistive resources, these functionalities were inactive during the research, displaying error messages.
In the evaluation of the highest-ranked portals, positive points were detected, such as the fact that all images on the page had the necessary alternative text equivalent. Another positive aspect was the display of banner-type elements not being contained within any element with other semantics.
In any case, it seems obvious that improving accessibility in this segment is not ' just ' a matter of social responsibility, inclusion, and empathy. It is also a strategy with a significant impact on business.
