If you’re not tracking all of the metrics possible on your eCommerce store, you need to start right away. It’s impossible to make any strategic changes to your website if you don’t have the data to support your hypothesis.
Huge eCommerce sites like Amazon spend millions of dollars each year on refining and perfecting their checkout process because they know how important it is. Just a 1% increase in your conversion rate could change the future of your company.
Your goal is never to let a customer leave your website without purchasing, and while you’ll never get there, the pursuit is the most important thing.
What is Cart Abandonment?
Cart abandonment is one of the most important metrics because it gives you a lot of information about your checkout process. This parameter refers to the percentage of people who fail to purchase anything after adding the items to their cart.
You might be surprised to hear that this can be as high as 90%. Imagine how much more money you’d make if you could cut that rate down. Let’s look at a few tactics that can help to boost your checkout rate and reduce the number of abandoned carts.
Use Trusted Transaction Methods and Logos
Asking people to hand over their payment details isn’t a trivial matter. We’re all acutely aware of the risk of fraud and are unlikely to input our details to a website that looks unattractive and not cared for.
Firstly, make sure that your website is visually appealing and secondly ensure that you’re using popular and trusted transaction methods like; Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Stripe. Secondly, use their trusted logos and safety assurance logos on the checkout page.
Include a Progress Indicator
When we shop many of us can get annoyed at how long it takes to checkout. It can often seem like we go through hundreds of different pages, having to fill out far too many details.
One method to ease the customer’s mind is to include a progress bar at the top of the form which shows them which step they are at. This can show them that they are close to the end and encourage them to finish the transaction.
Make Getting to the Cart and Checkout Page Easy
Plenty of customers simply abandon their carts because checking out is too painful. Your customers shouldn’t have to click through multiple dropdown lists just to give you their money.
This can be easily solved by allowing customers to checkout with a single click.
Use Strong Calls to Action
In the past, many businesses have made the mistake of thinking that once a customer has added something to their cart, they don’t need to be pushed to purchase.
This isn’t the case, and the abandonment rate before even clicking to check their cart is extremely high. This suggests that many people don’t even begin the process of checking out.
To solve this, you should implement strong calls to action that tell the customer to start the payment process.
Allow People to Save Their Carts
Many of us love the products that we add to our carts, but we might not be ready to purchase yet, or we might want to look at other retailers first.
The worst thing that you can do is to let that cart disappear. Instead, allow your users to save their carts so that when they do come back the process is extremely easy and they can hand over their money quickly without thinking about it.
Allow Guests to Purchase
Some of the most popular websites still require users to register an account just to purchase a product, and it’s having a substantial impact on their abandonment rate.
Ocourse, you should encourage them to create an account, but if they don’t want to, then there should be an option for them to purchase as a guest. Money is money; your accountant doesn’t care if they have a registered account or not.
Reduce Page Load Times
Have you ever tried to checkout on a slow page? We have, it sucks. In fact, page speed is one of the most common reasons that small eCommerce businesses are losing customers.
The process of shopping should be fast paced; you shouldn’t be making your customers wait.
Use Re-marketing
Finally, you need to accept that a percentage of customers will abandon their carts. The best thing that you can do with this group is to use re-targeting to market the same products to them later on.
For example; if they added a pair of brown shoes to their cart and then left, you could use Facebook ads to show them the same brown shoes with the text “They’re still waiting for you!”.
Conclusion
Cart abandonment is natural, but it’s certainly not something you should ignore. These people are extremely close to handing over their money and pushing them over the edge is going to be far cheaper than finding entirely new customers.