5 Simple Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
You might be driving a respectable amount of traffic to your online store, but your visitor count means nothing if a large percentage of your visitors are abandoning their shopping carts. If people have gone to the trouble of visiting your website, browsing through your products and adding one or more items to a shopping cart, and then leaving at the last minute before they check out, there may be a serious problem with your website. While oftentimes shopping cart abandonment comes down to indecisive buyers, there are many factors that are fully within your control.
The rate of shopping cart abandonment in eCommerce is staggering. Some estimates for particular industries put the figure at 85 percent. It should, therefore, be a key priority in your online strategy. After all, you are probably doing everything else to maximize sales so it is also important to work on reducing shopping cart abandonment to maximize your conversions.
You can do this in two steps. The first is preventing as many people as possible from abandoning their carts before they complete a purchase. The second is to bring the people you couldn't convert back to your website at a later date.
1. Ask for less information
Web users are often short on patience, particularly when using the small and fiddly touchscreens of mobile devices. However, it is now absolutely imperative that your online store accommodates mobile users as best as possible, and this means not asking for any information that isn't absolutely necessary.
While customer accounts containing plenty of useful information might sound like a marketing goldmine, asking for too much is a sure way to put people off. In fact, you should also offer an option allowing people to complete a purchase without having to create a customer account at all.
2. Offer multiple delivery options
Some people want their products delivered to them as soon as possible, and will be willing to pay the extra for it. Others, however, would rather wait longer and save some money.
Multiple studies have shown that just over one-third of all cases of shopping cart abandonment were due to shipping costs being too high. Another 10 percent of cases were down to shipping times being too long. To accommodate the needs of all of your customers, you'll need to provide a range of shipping options, including a premium delivery service for those who want their goods quickly and a free service for the more budget-conscious.
3. Keep the checkout process clear
A slow or cumbersome website that is difficult to use will turn people away in droves. Checkout processes in particular are often more time-consuming and complicated than they need to be, particularly on mobile devices. About one-fourth of shopping cart abandonment cases are due to unintuitive checkout processes that lack clear calls to action or have confusing payment processes.
Online shoppers also like to know what to expect, so show the number of steps left to complete the checkout process. Not only does your online store need to offer a quick and painless checkout procedure, it also needs to demonstrate how easy it is.
4. Don't forget the trust signals
With the plethora of online scams out there, it shouldn't come as any surprise that many buyers are wary when shopping online, particularly when buying from a new company for the first time. Including widely recognized trust signals as well as having an up-to-date TSL (transport layer security) certificate is absolutely essential for instilling a sense of trust and protecting your reputation. In fact, according to Shopify, over three-fourths of consumers have abandoned a shopping cart because they didn't see any trust badges that they recognized. Among the best known badges are VeriSign, McAfee Secure and PayPal Verified.
5. Provide Multiple Payment Options
This one shouldn't come as any surprise, but one of the most common reasons that people abandon a purchase is because the online store doesn't offer their preferred payment option. If you're only providing one option, you'll end up alienating a huge number of potential customers. Allowing people to pay with credit or debit cards is obviously a must, but there are far more options available these days, including PayPal and Google Wallet. In some countries, pay on delivery and direct bank transfers also remain popular. Make it effortless for people to save their payment details so they can check out with a single click when they return.
Even if you implement each of the tips above, you will still lose customers at the shopping cart stage. Can you get them back, and if so, how? You can get them back, and the best way to do it is remarketing.
You can run remarketing campaigns on Google's AdWords, Facebook, and other platforms. In simple terms, past visitors to your website are shown ads about your business as they browse the internet. This ensures your business is front of mind when they are ready to complete the purchase.
Dealing with shopping cart abandonment can both increase revenue and help you forge stronger relationships with your customers.
