Shopping cart abandonment is a common issue that any eCommerce business all around the world has been facing. As per industry reports, almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Many customers give up their purchases which might have negative effects on the eCommerce business from a long-term perspective. Abandoned carts represent lost opportunities.
Thus, this article will describe the reasons why shopping carts are abandoned and effective ways to deal with it.
Why Are Shopping Carts Usually Abandoned?
There is no doubt that if you want to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts, you must discover the reasons why it occurs. So, below are the 7 main reasons why people leave their carts.
- Customers are not glad about the shipping cost or taxes.
- Payment options are not clear.
- Customers find more reasonable prices for products on your competitor’s website.
- Customers have to create a new user account or the system does not offer customers with guest checkout.
- Long and complex check-out process.
- No express shipping is available.
- Customers are concerned about website data and transaction security.
After understanding why cart abandonment occurs, let’s get to the tips on how to encourage customers to complete their purchase process.
Strategies to Reduce Abandoned Cart Rates
- Provide Free or Lower Shipping Cost
One study shows that 44% of online shoppers do not complete their purchase process because of high shipping fees or handling costs. Therefore, high shipping cost is one of the most critical reasons leading to cart abandonment and causing a large number of potential customers’ losses for online stores. To solve this problem, many companies offer free shipping as an incentive to encourage buyers to continue shopping and finally check out all added products in the shopping cart.
However, it seems improper to offer free shipping all the time due to possible high delivery costs of products. Thus, instead of providing customers free shipping each time, it can be offered in some promotion campaigns to boost up sales. Free shipping can be offered for a minimum cart value which is a common strategy employed by grocery ecommerce companies and this also boosts overall transaction value. Subscription members can be offered free shipping as employed by Amazon for its Prime members.
2. Provide Full Information about Fees
Many customers cancel their orders because a website does not inform about shipping fees properly. It means that people don’t want to face surprises when ordering a product. So, to avoid this problem, you should reveal all additional fees upfront before customers add items to their cart.
3. Make the Cart Visible
One more reason why people abandon a transaction is that they want to save their items to check them later. Therefore, in order to make sure that your customers backtrack your website to buy that item, keep the cart in a visible place. It is a good practice to place a cart icon in the top right corner of the screen that enables it to expand when hovering it over. Besides, you also can look at popular eCommerce websites such as Amazon, Walmart Best Buy, or eBay to see how they put their cart icon on the site.
4. Allow Guest to Checkout
It is quite awkward to allow only registered customers to proceed with the checkout. It not only makes the process slower but also stops customers from undergoing this step.
Let’s analyze the situation when your customers are interested in buying your products but do not have an account on your site. In this case, to complete their purchase, they have to compulsorily create a new account by providing several other additional information that may be required for account creation. It is really time-consuming and even irritative. It often ends up with customers leaving such a website immediately due to long and complicated processes.
Thus, don’t neglect guest customers and provide them with the most convenient shopping experience of proceeding with a checkout page. Moreover, eCommerce stores can allow buyers to create a new account while they are checking out.
5. Make Checkout Process Quick and Simple
When an online shopper needs to undergo a checkout process with many unnecessary steps on several pages, it feels frustrating. A complicated checkout process is a common reason for giving up the cart. So, one of the best ways to reduce cart abandonment rate is to optimize the checkout process right away. You can do this by collecting feedback from your customers or your target audience on how it feels to make a purchase on your website. Then, you can implement changes that many of your customers have highlighted.
6. Always Be Available to Answer
A large number of customers will probably have some questions when completing a purchase. Thus, giving them the ability to ask via a live chat is quite a good idea to satisfy your customers’ needs for information and encourage them to complete the transaction.
7. Save Abandoned Cart
When customers leave their carts, it does not mean they do not want to buy products they looked at. It can simply mean they want to save those items for consideration in the future. So, saving items on the cart and sending an abandoned cart reminder can encourage a customer to backtrack their cart and complete their purchase.
Besides sending reminder emails, you can offer a “Save for Later” or “Wishlist” feature on your website to help customers with saving the needed products to be able to buy them easily later.
8. Offer Discounts
Applying discounts or coupon codes for products is a very effective way to encourage people to continue the checkout process for saved products.
9. Provide a Variety of Payment Options
As far as we know, each payment method is suitable for each customer group. Not all customers can pay with the same payment options. Some of them are interested in paying with PayPal while other people prefer Payoneer, etc. Therefore, offering as many payment methods as you can is a good way to decrease cart abandonment rates.
10. Show Scarcity
Scarcity always gives the push to complete a purchase and do this as soon as possible. You can implement that with a banner, a notification about the number of items remaining, or by adding a countdown clock.
11. Display Exit Pop-up
Exit pop-ups will give you a huge chance to maximize your revenue. For instance, when someone who has abandoned a cart intends to quit your site, you can show them a reminder about the abandoned cart and a coupon code for the discount.
12. Show Security Badges
Many people do not complete an online transaction because they worry about security. They need to have assurances that they won’t be scammed after they have entered their payment details. Thus, your online store should have an SSL certificate, security badge, lock icons, or privacy policies if you do not want to lose your customers.
Bottom Line
In a nutshell, the described tips can help online stores to decrease cart abandonment rates which is a very widespread problem among online businesses today. Moreover, this way, store owners can improve the shopping experience for their customers as well as boost up sales after implementing at least some of those ideas.