How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Learn how to encourage customers to follow through and complete their orders.
If you sell products online, shopping cart abandonment is often one of the most frustrating problems that you will encounter. You invested time and resources into advertising your products and successfully guided prospective clients to your site. You were so close to a conversion — only for the user to bounce from your site just before making a purchase.
In the article below, we’ll discuss ideas for how to reduce shopping cart abandonment so that you can improve conversion rates and generate more revenue.
Read on to learn more about how you can create a higher-quality online purchasing experience!
What is shopping cart abandonment?
Before we discuss exactly how to reduce shopping cart abandonment, it is crucial to understand what causes this lack of follow-through in the first place.
Most abandoned carts are the result of “friction” during the online purchasing process. Friction includes anything that diminishes the user experience, such as excessive pop-up windows, a complicated payment process, or frivolous upsell attempts.
In order to reduce friction, we recommend that you:
Provide shoppers with seamless navigation
Easy navigation is the name of the game when it comes to reducing cart abandonment. Whether it’s having the cart icon visible while customers are shopping or giving them an easy way to return to your store from the checkout page if they want to add more items, making sure users can move through your site quickly will help reduce their frustration and the chance that they’ll leave before making a purchase.
Offer multiple payment options
While only accepting a single form of payment may make things easier on your company’s accounting staff, it diminishes the customer experience.
If you want to increase sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, offer a multitude of payment options, including major credit cards and other mainstream payment options like PayPal or Apple Pay. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for consumers to spend money on your site!
Allow guest checkout
When a user creates an account, you gain access to valuable consumer data that is beneficial for marketing purposes. While having this feature in place can be helpful, you might want to reconsider making it mandatory if you’re experiencing a lot of shopping cart abandonment.
First-time users that are not yet loyal to your brand could be discouraged by prompts to create an account on your site. While many of them will create the account so that they can complete the purchase, others may end up abandoning their carts.
During the checkout process, give users the option to sign out as a guest or create an account. Buyers with the highest interest in your products and services will sign up, whereas casual consumers will opt for the simpler route.
Include upfront pricing and free shipping
Hidden costs can be a major turn-off for consumers. For example, if they start the checkout process and suddenly find out that excessive fees have been tacked onto the listed purchase price, they’re more likely to abandon ship and shop elsewhere.
While there are some taxes and fees you can’t avoid adding on at checkout, try to avoid any other surprise charges if you can.
If possible, offer free shipping for purchases over a specific dollar amount. This will allow you to be even more transparent with pricing while simultaneously encouraging consumers to spend more.
Now that you know how to reduce shopping cart abandonment, it is time to leverage these tips to improve your e-commerce store.
If you’re looking for a new e-commerce solution or just want some guidance from the pros, contact our team at GOPD! We provide customized e-commerce solutions that can help you take your business to the next level!