On average, online shoppers abandon shopping carts 65.23 percent of the time. That leads to trillions of dollars in losses for eCommerce businesses.
If you’ve been facing this problem in your eCommerce business, don’t panic. In today’s post, we tell you some ways you can reduce cart abandonment and see more conversions in your business.
What Is Cart Abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment refers to instances when visitors to your online store add items to their online shopping carts but leave before paying. Every case of online shopping cart abandonment in your store means you’re missing opportunities and losing revenue.
There’s a variety of reasons shoppers choose to abandon online shopping carts, but regardless of why they’re doing so, you can still reduce the cart abandonment rate in your store.
Minimizing Shopping Cart Abandonment
The best way to tackle the high shopping cart abandonment rate in your eCommerce store is to find out why customers aren’t completing the shopping process in the first place. This section addresses the five top reasons for cart abandonment and shows you solutions to each.
1. High or Unexpected Extra Charges
This is arguably the commonest reason for a customer to abandon their shopping cart. A buyer finds an item they like, considers the price, and decides to make a purchase. But when they get to your checkout page, they see something they didn’t expect in the payment summary.
They see taxes, shipping costs, and other charges on top of the item’s original price. This causes the item’s cost to rise unexpectedly. Shoppers get frustrated and angered, so they abandon their shopping cart immediately.
Solution
Understandably, you can’t waive extra charges every time a customer makes a purchase. But you also can’t sacrifice making sales. The solution is to set realistic expectations from the beginning, so consumers don’t encounter unexpected costs during checkout.
If you offer free shipping for a minimum shopping, display that information clearly on your product pages. If you have a fixed shipping charge, display it prominently too. This way, shoppers don’t encounter an unpleasant surprise during checkout.
2. Requiring Customers to Register
The top reason people shop online is because of the speed and convenience of doing so. No shopper wants to go through a dozen steps to purchase a few products.
If a customer has to create an account with you to complete their purchase, it’s a frustrating experience. It’s one of the top reasons for cart abandonment.
Solution
Make it simple for shoppers to make their purchases by adding a guest checkout option. You can also have a signup button for social media so consumers can easily create an account using their preferred social media account. Having both options adds convenience for shoppers.
3. Long and Complex Checkout
This problem is even worse than the second one as it makes creating an account just one of the steps in a long, confusing checkout process. In this case, you may require consumers to enter their shipping and billing info, among other steps.
Solution
Try to reduce the fields required in the forms for checkout and payment. If a field isn’t necessary for a customer to make a purchase, do away with it.
For instance, instead of customers having to enter their shipping and billing addresses separately, you can give them the option to choose “ship to the billing address.” By doing so, they’ll only be required to fill in any additional fields if they’re shipping the item to a different address.
You can also reduce customers’ frustrations by clearly showing them the progress of their checkout progress. A progress indicator comes in handy here. This indicator lets customers know their exact stage of the checkout progress and the number of steps left.
4. Website Errors and Crashes
It’s every consumer’s nightmare to use a website that shows errors or crashes during their online shopping process. A significant number of shoppers will immediately abandon their shopping cart once they experience this.
Solution
Great digital experience is vital for every eCommerce business in today’s highly competitive online space. As a business, you cannot expect customers to keep making purchases until your checkout page opens.
So, what should you do to avoid these issues?
First, make sure your business site is functioning smoothly. Check for and deal with bugs. Consider hiring a team of experts to test your website and tackle errors immediately.
Regularly track common issues such as whether all plugins are compatible with common browsers. Make sure there is ample bandwidth and memory on your server.
These ways can help boost user experience and encourage customers to complete purchases.
5. Payment Security Concerns
Ensuring that your customers have the most secure payment gateway possible is absolutely necessary. No consumer wants to have their payment information compromised.
Many brands don’t make it clear to customers that their payment details are protected. If customers don’t know that, many will hesitate to provide their card details. Eventually, you’ll have more customers abandoning their shopping carts.
Solution
It’s only natural for people to fear for their card information. So, how can you fix this issue and prove to potential customers that they can trust your website?
The solution lies in using trusted payment gateways. Top brands like PayPal inspire confidence.
The moment you add trust seals on your checkout seals, you’ll start to see an increase in conversion rates. Display these trust seals next to the CTA button to relieve customer anxiety. To find whether a trust seal works for you, you can display it on one page and run a test to compare performance on this page and a page without.
Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment in Your Store Today
Don’t let high rates of shopping cart abandonment plague your business any longer. There are lots of ways to encourage customers to complete purchases and keep coming back. The tips we’ve shared in this post are an excellent place to start.
Would you like to read more great content on increasing conversion rates in your store? Please keep visiting our blog.
