For an e-commerce retailer, nothing can be worse than seeing a lot of shopping cart abandonments. Nothing can be more frustrating than having shoppers not completing the checkout process. You worked hard and invested time and money to build your e-commerce website hoping for a return on investment. Studies show that 60% – 80% of shoppers who click the “buy now” button abandon their shopping cart.
Every e-commerce retailer aspires to achieve a high conversion rate. They dread the thought of shopping cart abandonment. You are left wondering what went wrong with your shopping cart. Reducing cart abandonment is vital to optimizing the customer journey and improving the chances of the customer completing the checkout process and purchasing your product or service. Here are some steps on how you can improve your shopping cart conversion rate.
- Make Your Shopping Cart Simple
- Improve Loading Time
- Skip The Registration
- Plan A Clear Path For Shoppers
- Remove Checkout Distractions
- Use Autofill
- Retarget Customers
- Use Rewards and Sales Promotions
- Display A Progress Bar
- Never Stop Testing
Let’s discuss in details
1. Make Your Shopping Cart Simple
Most shoppers don’t like waiting. A Baymard Institute survey revealed that 23% of customers abandoned shopping carts because of a complicated checkout process. While first-time customers will take their time buying from your site, the longer the process takes, the more likely is shopping cart abandonment. In addition, 25% of the customers said that navigation was too complicated.
Shoppers don’t want to be interrupted during the buying process. Reducing the number of buttons, text, and links on your checkout page will result in a simpler shopping experience for your customers. Allow buyers to shop instantly or continue shopping. Consider using continuous shopping carts to indefinitely retain your user’s selections.
You can avoid shopping cart abandonment by simplifying checkout and focusing on the interaction itself. Inform customers of what they can expect in terms of delivery options. If you do upselling and cross-selling, make sure that they won’t impede your customers ability to check out.
2. Improve Loading Time
Customers don’t have the luxury of time when purchasing something from your website. Hence, the loading time is crucial during the checkout process. According to Hubspot, just a second of lag in loading time can cost your company $1.6 billion in annual sales. A delay of 3 seconds in loading time can result in a 40% cart abandonment rate.
A slow loading shopping cart gives your customers more time to think about whether to do business with you or not. Don’t give them sufficient reasons to leave your website and do business elsewhere. There are several factors that contribute to slow loading time. It could boil down to the hosting quality and your site structure.
Ensure that your website checkout page loads quickly or else you will lose business to the competition. Remove all the elements that will slow down your checkout process. A few seconds could make a difference between earning or losing thousands of dollars annually.
3. Skip The Registration
Not all of your shoppers will be okay with sharing their personal information with your website. Customers find value in your items to purchase them but not all of them are willing to open an account. Letting your customers register when buying from your website is another reason for cart abandonment.
Registration can be a tedious and lengthy process which is often not related to making a purchase. Shoppers already input information like name, shipping address, billing address, and other information needed for the transaction. In addition, they will also be asked for an email address for sending receipts and updating order status.
Before entering the checkout process, clearly state that registration is optional. Some shoppers are okay with registration so give them that option as well. Also, you can make the password field optional. Another way to skip the registration is guest checkout. This will allow your customer to purchase from your website even without creating an account.
4. Plan A Clear Path For Shoppers
Another reason why customers would abandon their shopping cart is that they are unsure of the next steps to take. For them to be able to complete the checkout process, you should clearly list what steps you should take. Imagine that your customers have never shopped online before. Ensure that your process is easy and simple to understand.
Eliminate the number of steps your customers need to take before they can reach the shopping cart. Avoid pulling off any surprises that will keep your customers from making a purchase like unexpected shipping costs or fees that increases the expected total amount.
Make sure that your shopping cart can be easily located by your customers. Use a highly visible icon and oversized button for easy access. Make the cart icon sticky so that it follows customers as they shop.
5. Remove Checkout Distractions
Removing distractions is also critical to reducing shopping cart abandonment. The key to success with e-commerce purchases is to hold consumer’s attention, which is one of the biggest challenges for online retailers. Here are 5 checkout distractions that you should remove from your e-commerce store for a successful checkout:
- Competitive Amazon Advertising. Your competitors may distract your customers by placing highly targeted ads for their products in the middle of your Amazon product pages. To stop your competitor from targeting your products, use Product Display ads of your own products.
- Non-user Friendly Checkout Process. Studies show that e-commerce stores lose more than 75% of their sales to cart abandonment. There are many factors that contribute to this like hidden costs, disruptive registration, confusing checkout, and payment security concerns.
- Lack of Clear Next Steps. Customers decide to abandon their shopping cart because it is not clear to visitors where to go next once they have landed on your website. Your advertising promised that you have what customers need but if they cannot find it, they are going to leave and search for another website that can deliver on what you promised.
- Social Media Sharing Buttons. There is a time and place for social media sharing buttons and your product page is not one of them. A Facebook or Twitter button can easily drive shoppers away from your page.
- Offering Too Much Choice. Giving customers a choice can be attractive but too much of it can do more harm than good. In fact, studies show that too many options can be overwhelming resulting in fewer sales.
6. Use Autofill
Filling up shipping and payment information can be time consuming and may become a source of frustration during the checkout process. Implementing autofill can be a significant help to improving shopping rate conversion. The few seconds you can save can have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
For example, you can apply autofill on the city and country after visitors enter their zip code on the checkout page. It can significantly boost the overall conversion rate. You can also use autofill for credit card information as only 19% of online shoppers have their primary credit card memorized.
With autofill, all the information that your customers need will be stored in a drop-down menu. The stored information will be automatically populated the next time you checkout. Eliminating the need to manually enter addresses and billing and shipping information can help improve the checkout process.
7. Retarget Customers
Just because a customer added something to their shopping cart does not mean they will make a purchase. This is not always the case because they might just be browsing. Studies show that 56% of customers add to a shopping cart just to save a product for the future. Retargeting these customers can be one of the ways you can increase your shopping cart conversion rate. 91% of marketers find it to be a high-performing way to bring customers back,
According to studies, 97% of people who visit your online store for the first time will leave without buying anything and then they are lost forever. This is the aim of retargeting – to bring those customers who showed interest in your product but never came back. It also helps build visibility for your brand.
Retargeting aims to help customers make up their minds about purchasing and ensure that they hear your message at least 7 times. You can leverage various remarketing tools like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It is more cost-effective than other types of advertising. You can use retargeting to showcase your top selling products.
8. Use Rewards and Sales Promotions
Another way you can boost your shopping cart conversion is by offering rewards and sales promotions. Rewarding your loyal customers can help reinforce relationships. You can encourage your customers to check out and buy more stuff on your website by offering discounts on a certain price threshold.
Offering loyalty programs provide opportunities for customers to create an account on your website. For example, you can offer welcome points to help your visitor complete the customer journey. With the knowledge that they can earn significant discounts and perks, it will motivate them to make more purchases.
Studies have shown that there’s a 27% chance your customer will return to your store after one purchase. After a second purchase, the conversion rate jumps to 45%. Implementing the right rewards program will increase your shopping conversion rate. You can offer a tiered loyalty program with increasing rewards points as customers increase their loyalty.
9. Display A Progress Bar
Progress bars or indicators let customers know how far away they are from completing the checkout process. Shoppers always have the assumption that they still have a long way to go and decide to just give up the purchase without knowing how close they are. 20% of buyers said their main reason for abandoning a purchase is due to a long and complicated checkout process.
Progress bars can be implemented on both email and on-site. With email, the progress is sent as a prompt. The on-site option can be displayed depending on your intention from a subtle prompt to whole screen takeover. A successful progress bar should have the following:
- Clear indication of the goal
- Make it clearly visible
- It should be triggered at the right time or shown in a number of ways depending on what works best for you.
10. Never Stop Testing
Improving your shopping cart conversion rate should be a continuous process. Even minor changes to your shopping cart can give conversion a huge boost. The goal should be making the checkout process clearer and easier. Testing helps validate any changes that you make so you can be sure that they will work. It will help you determine what works and does not work for your shopping cart.
Before attempting to get more visitors, you need to understand the reason why they abandon their cart in the first place. By continuous testing, you will be able to achieve excellent user experience and consequently an increased return on investment. Checkout does not only involve one click but contains a series of steps that can help customers complete the checkout process.
Abandoned carts can be fixed by tweaking the design, checkout flow, removing distractions, and length of the forms. You need to consistently test until you find out what works best and delivers the highest conversion rate.
Improving your shopping cart is crucial to converting your visitors and ensuring their loyalty to your brand. Keep these 10 tips in mind to lessen your shopping cart abandonment.
airisX E-commerce Services
airisX has a complete range of individual and complete solutions for ecommerce sellers – our bread and butter. Born out of necessity to help ecommerce sellers scale their businesses and lower their costs, we solve your pain points by bringing all your ecommerce staffing needs under one roof.
airisX works with a large number of companies that build and run their own ecommerce platforms/websites (self-coded or through Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.). We manage customer support teams/back office support teams for some of the largest websites in the world today, including 4 of the top 20 largest apparel websites in the world.