How can we prevent shopping cart abandonment from happening?
Not only you that feel “meh…I don’t want this anymore”, after adding products in your cart on a shopping website. Seriously, it is such a normal thing to do as there are so many variables that made us change our minds, right? On the other hand, if you work for or own an e-commerce site, shopping cart abandonment would be one of the things that you don’t want it to happen. By the reason that it affects directly to your conversion rate.
Let’s think about marketing funnel, imagine that you have spent so much money for marketing activities, such as to generate awareness, to make the target customers interested in your products or services, to make them consider your products or services, and then to encourage purchase intention.
A customer of yours comes through each of those funnels, you are about to get new sales from this customer… only one click “make a purchase” away and Puff!, the customer left the website with all the products in his/her shopping cart. All of those marketing spend can’t contribute to some potential customers’ willingness to make the final purchases.
Isn’t it painful?
You would be blown away to know how much percentage of shopping cart abandonment happen, not 10% or 20%, but almost 70%..!! Plus, more than 80% of customers, in average abandoned their carts before making the final purchases. It surely decreases your total revenue and profit. However, don’t let this rate scare you. Let’s take a look of some significant ways that can help declining this problem.
1. Make the transaction process trustworthy.
Try your best to establish trust when it comes to transaction form. By the reason that you are asking customers to give you their personal information, especially their credit card information. The security logo can help making them feel safer as Shopify revealed that more than 60% of customers decide not to purchase some thing when they don’t see the trust or security logo.
2. Make the store page and shopping cart easy to navigate.
As customers tend to go back and forth between the store page and their shopping carts, it is important to make the navigation flow, effortlessly. By the reason that the easier to navigate you site, the higher tendency for them to stick around and complete the purchases. Additionally, make sure that the cart is automatically saved even customer clicked ‘back’ or even exit the store.
3. Make sure to have a strong Call-To-Action to checkout.
Since customers tend to feel lack of motivation to make a purchase after adding products to the cart. They should be motivated and reminded to complete the payment process. Anyhow, the CTAs should be as clear as possible, remember you are trying to persuade them to checkout, so go straight to the point! For example, “checkout now, free shipping with any order over $50.”
4. Offer different payment options.
By the fact that there are so many payment options available, nowadays. so, giving multiple ways for customers to complete the payment can crucially decrease the rate of shopping cart abandonment. Credit card option is a must but Paypal is also playing a huge role in facilitating the payment. Furthermore there are options like buy now, pay later, or even to split the total payment in monthly chunks with no interest rate.
5. Offer Guest checkout option.
It can be really annoying for customers to be forced to create an account when they just want to complete the purchase. The data shows that 14% of customers decide to abandon their shopping carts because of that reason. So, offering the guest checkout is one of the best way to facilitate and drive your customers to purchase. It is worth it, even though you have to sacrifice some useful customer’s data.
6. Be clear about the costs upfront, mainly the shipping fee.
Trust me, all of the hidden costs and surcharges make customers frustrated. Plus, shipping fee is the biggest variable that contributes to the shopping cart abandonment because customers hate to pay for it. So, make sure to not surprise them with shipping cost in the end of completing the payment, be forthcoming as much as you can.
7. Make sure that the loading time for your site is within 3 seconds.
As the data shows that the shopping cart conversion rate declines 7% in each second it takes for your website to be fully load, customers have strong expectations for your e-commerce site to be loaded fast and if it does not, they will surely exit the site, left their carts, and look for another site to do business with. Quality of the images is also significant because those images are one of the key things that persuade and influence customers’ purchase intention.
8. Lastly, retargeting those abandoners.
Re-marketing the customers who left their shopping carts is they key to win them back. There are so many channels to retarget, such as Facebook and Instagram, Email and Google Adwords. By the fact that the more customers see the products they once wanted and almost bought, the higher tendency for them to decide to finally buy those products.
From those tips above, if you do all of them, I am sure that you will be able to prevent and decrease the shopping cart abandonment from happening. For those who work for e-commerce companies, it is beneficial not to forget YOUR point of views as a CUSTOMER. By the reason that deep down, you all know and experience some bad e-commerce sites that force you to leave your cart, even though you wanted those products in your cart. Try to remember what makes you decided to close the web page. Use your experience to prevent the same thing from happening to your customers as your sales depend on it.
