How many times have you seen this happen: a customer added your product to their cart, only to ghost at the last second? If you run an online store, you know the feeling. You’re probably sick of people adding products to their carts but not finishing the checkout process.
Getting your customers to complete their purchase is a daunting task. But with these simple steps, you’ll be able to reduce eCommerce cart abandonment and improve your conversion rate.
Factors That Lead to Cart Abandonment
Several different factors can cause cart abandonment.
- Customers can change their minds and decide not to purchase the item. The person decides they aren’t ready to make the purchase yet, but leaves items in their cart for future reference.
- Long forms that require customers to enter too much information.
- Prices. A customer may be comparing prices or looking for a better deal from a different retailer.
- Delivery charges. If the delivery charge is too high, the customer may decide it’s not worth paying shipping costs.
- The checkout process was too long, complicated, or confusing. Some customers decide to abandon their online purchase after seeing how much personal information they need to share or if they have to create an account with your business before completing their purchase.
- Due to website errors or crashes during the checkout process. This can happen if you don’t have a reliable web hosting provider who can handle traffic surges during peak periods.
Tips to Reduce Ecommerce Cart Abandonment
The good news is you can reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate and increase your conversion rate by addressing some of the common reasons for shopping cart abandonment.
Recommendations
Recommendations are a great way to keep customers engaged, especially when they’re on the fence about making a purchase. For example, if someone is looking at a backpack and hasn’t added it to their cart yet, recommend other items that might go well with it. Some examples include cameras or clothes. Or consider showing similar products they might be interested in.
Using recommendation software like Argoid, you can reduce online shopping cart abandonment. AI-powered recommendation systems help merchants increase their revenue and conversions by providing smart suggestions to shoppers. It works on any website, and its recommendations are dynamic, comprehensive, and intelligent.
It is integrated with your store in just a few minutes and makes suggestions to your shoppers right away. This recommendation system learns from a shopper’s browsing behavior on your store and then provides recommendations that match the customer’s interest.
Make It Easy to Find the Cart
One of the easiest ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment is to have the “View Cart” button in plain sight at all times on your website. Many merchants make it difficult for shoppers to find their cart, resulting in them abandoning it altogether. Make sure that your “View Cart” button is visible on every page of your website, usually in the top right-hand corner. This will make it easy for shoppers to jump into their carts whenever they need to update or remove items.
Reduce the Number of Form Fields Customers Have to Fill Out
For every form section you ask customers to complete, expect an additional 5% drop in conversion rates and a corresponding bump in abandonments.
If you run an online store with physical products, it’s essential to collect shipping information from customers. This is necessary for determining shipping costs and delivery dates. If you’re selling digital products, this is not necessary. Reduce the number of form fields by only asking for what’s necessary at checkout.
Include Shipping Costs and Return Policies In the Cart Summary
Many times, customers only see shipping costs when they get to checkout. This might cause them to abandon their order because of the high shipping costs.
To prevent this from happening, including the shipping costs in your cart summary. This way, there’s no surprise for your customers when they get to checkout. Or even better, offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount.
Also, include details about your return policy in the cart summary. This can help reassure customers that they can return any item if they don’t like it. Better yet, you can provide free shipping.
Customers want free shipping no matter how much they spend. 92% of consumers will abandon an item in their cart if they don’t get free shipping. If you can’t offer free shipping across the board, consider offering it only when customers meet a certain spend threshold – or automatically applying a coupon code to the cart if the customer tries to leave before checkout is complete.
Optimize for Mobile Shoppers
You can’t expect people to complete a purchase on an e-commerce site that isn’t mobile-friendly. Research shows that most people conduct research, compare products, and make purchases on their phones. Customers will have difficulty navigating through your pages if your website isn’t mobile-optimized, especially on smaller screens. This can easily frustrate them enough to leave and never return.
Offer Guest Checkout
If you force shoppers to create an account with your site before confirming their order, you’re asking them to spend time doing something that feels risky. Just as many people are uncomfortable entering their credit card information online, some are also hesitant to submit their email addresses for fear of getting spam. Adding a step like this can deter some shoppers from finalizing their orders.
Improve Site Speed
According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. While reducing site speed might seem like something that only larger eCommerce companies would be concerned with, even minor improvements in this area can make a big difference. Consider testing your site speed by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
A slow site can easily frustrate customers and make them abandon their carts. In addition, Google punishes sites with longer load times by ranking them lower in search results.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
The most basic way to reduce cart abandonment is to offer multiple payment options at the checkout. This might mean accepting all major credit cards, PayPal or Google Checkout, depending on what’s popular with your target audience.
Even if you don’t want to accept every form of payment known to commerce, expanding your payment options beyond just one or two options can increase your sales by a significant margin.
You might also consider accepting offline payment methods like personal checks or money orders.
Add a Progress Indicator
A progress indicator is a series of steps displayed in your checkout process. The indicator shows the customer where they are in the checkout process and what steps remain before it is complete.
The progress indicator also allows you to display messages to the customer such as “You’re almost done!” or “Only one step left!.” This messaging increases buy-in from the customer and reassures them they are on the right track.
Conclusion
Abandoned carts are one of the most significant sources of lost revenue for any e-commerce business. While usually there’s a small percentage of abandoned shopping carts on most online shops, reducing this percentage is crucial to increase profits. If a customer goes back to the cart and places an order even after hesitating in the first place, it means they already like what you offer, and they need extra encouragement.