Combating Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues
Imagine a situation where a buyer walks into a grocery store, pulls over a trolley, and walks through the store sections adding products to his cart. He walks towards the pet food section but sees a pug munching on Pedigree biscuits. The buyer who happens to be a pet lover plays with the puppy and in a few minutes, the pug runs out of the store. The buyer leaves the trolley behind and goes behind the pug.
How distressing it is for the store owner to see one of his potential buyers leave the trolley right before billing.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment is very much similar to the above incident. Approximately 70% of online buyers add products to the cart but do not checkout. They leave their shopping cart without completing the purchasing process. It is important to address this issue as an online store owner and find strategies to convert these potential buyers into sales.
Why do Buyers Abandon Carts?
There are several reasons as to why a buyer abandons the cart. It is observed that most of these drop-offs happen right before the checkout. Baymard Institute has found that 50% of users left their cart because of shipping charges. There are reasons for uncertainty observed with respect to the products as they cannot be physically reviewed. Another chunk of abandoned carts happen because of prolonged checkout processes. Some checkouts take almost 10-15 minutes to place successful orders. Isn’t it ridiculous? Apart from these reasons, just like there is window shopping in brick-and-mortar retail stores, e-commerce stores also face window shopping fallouts.
Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
With a sound understanding of abandoned carts and why it happens, let’s talk about how to prevent it as much as possible. There are several factors that influence a checkout and these factors depend on the type of audience and user behavior. Let us understand a few of the common factors.
Optimize Your Product Pages:
Product pages tend to be lengthy with a lot of details. While the main purpose of this page is to influence users to click on the add to cart button, it is important to optimize this page with respect to presentation, load time, and quality to avoid bounce rates and offer a good website user experience. A buyer may add a few products to a cart and land on a product page that is not optimized. This would become a factor for the buyer to lose interest and abandon the cart.
Focus on High-Quality Images:
A picture speaks a thousand words. Use images that are catchy and clear. While doing so keep the file size as low as possible. Remember load time increases with the increase in page size.
Keep it Short and Crisp:
Yes, it is important to list all the features and information about products, but do not make it an essay for buyers to read. Product pages should lead your buyer to buy the product as quickly as possible. List down the USPs (Unique Selling Points) of the product through infographics and leave the textual data behind buttons, accordions, and popups wherever possible.
Edit and Save Carts for Later
Provide an option to your buyers to edit the cart at any point in the checkout process. Your buyer may want to increase or decrease quantity or may like to buy a better version of the product than the one added to the cart. With edit functionality buyers can easily manage their cart list for final checkout rather than abandoning the cart. Logged-in members should have a facility to build a cart and save it for later. There are chances when your buyer is on the way to the office and builds up the cart but prefers to do the checkout once settled in the office or may want to consult a spouse or friends before the final checkout.
Simplified Checkout
Do not complicate the checkout process. Keep it as simple as possible with the bare minimum clicks and next buttons. One-step checkout is one of the best ways to complete the checkout process. Most of the e-commerce stores have plugins and extensions for one-page checkout. An expert eCommerce developer can help you switch your traditional checkout page into a one-page checkout within a few hours.
Many store owners have found one-page checkout to be a great tool to minimize abandoned carts and have seen an increase in sales. Remove unwanted fields from the checkout process. For example – Do you really need a phone number to complete the order?
One page checkout removes the 3-5 pages of navigation to complete the order and clubs everything in an accordion or Ajax-based form.
Allow users to auto-populate fields. Most of the time billing address and shipping address will be the same. Why should a buyer manually retype? A single check button should auto-fill the fields.
Payment Options
Provide as many possible options for payment. PayPal is one of the best ways to process payments. Stripe is another trending payment gateway to integrate into your store. Enable credit card, debit card, and net banking payment modes. Cash on Delivery (COD) is great but with social distancing to be followed try to avoid this feature and encourage contactless delivery.
You could also come up with creative ways of installment and EMI-based payment methods through credit cards.
Offer Return Policy
Make sure you effectively communicate your return policy by giving customers all the details about returns, exchanges, and refunds within actual days. You can choose to have a returns window from 15 to 30 days, starting from the day your order is delivered or purchased. When you have a seamless return process, it boosts customers’ trust in your business and boosts your sales.
Mobile Responsive Website
When you’re optimizing your website, giving priority to mobile devices is essential. Since many shoppers use their smartphones or tablets for online shopping, having a mobile-responsive site is very important for any eCommerce website. So, make sure your website is mobile-friendly!
Free Shipping
It is quite annoying to get charged for shipping on top of the total bill. While a waiver on the shipping charges would encourage buyers to buy from your store; shipping costs presented at the time of checkout have also become reasons for abandonment of the cart. You could offer free shipping when more than one product is purchased. This would encourage buyers to buy more from your store. You can also offer free shipping orders over $50 or some threshold value. This helps increase in Average Order Value (AOV) and reduce drop-off.
Conclusion
Abandonment of carts is a crucial issue across the e-commerce industry and effective engagement with users and improving checkout processes help reduce abandonment rates significantly. Looking to hire an eCommerce expert? Look no further! Atlas Softweb offers top-notch eCommerce solutions to enhance your online business. Get free estimation and website analysis from e-commerce experts to improve your sales.
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