Imagine covering so many steps in your ecommerce journey to get customers to shop through your website only to fail at the final hurdle.
That’s essentially what happens when someone adds an item to their basket but never completes the checkout stage — otherwise known as an abandoned cart.
Cart abandonment is by no means rare, and can be as high as 79% in some instances. However, having users not complete their purchase is a problem regardless of the percentage that may apply to your store.
Never fear as with these top tips, you can reduce abandoned cart instances today.
Simplify The Checkout Process
Just like when we shop in a physical store, we all appreciate it when we can easily move from A to B. In other words, finding the items we need quickly and checking out without any hassle.
Shoppers want exactly the same from your online store experience. Therefore, you should remove any unnecessary barriers within the sales journey including multiple steps, lengthy forms and other aspects that simply take too long or feel unnecessary.
Where possible, a one-click purchase can be extremely effective. In cases where you must add multiple screens or steps, make sure the experience is refined to reduce the admin for shoppers as much as possible.
Enable Guest Checkout
Hotjar found that 24% of online shoppers are put off by having to create an account first.
If customers are in a hurry, don’t quite trust the brand or only intend on making a one-time purchase, this is completely understandable. So why try to force a different outcome, especially when the likelihood is the customer would rather exit the page instead?
So long as you have the user’s payment and contact information, there is really no need to hold them to register if they just don’t want to. If they are satisfied with their sale, there is nothing to say they won’t return and eventually register at a later date. Though, this is unlikely to be the case if they feel they have no other choice than to abandon their cart.
Abandon Cart Emails
Abandon cart emails can be triggered automatically when an existing customer leaves something in their basket behind.
Industry averages for abandoned cart emails stand at 39.07% for open rates and around 23.3% for click-through rates. This means that by triggering an abandoned cart email, you can expect to get 1 in 5 customers back on your website.
The great thing about abandoned cart emails is they are something you can set up through your email platform as an automation technique, meaning you don’t have to manually send an email each time a customer doesn’t complete the checkout process.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
Could it be that your products and pricing are on point, but your payment options are not?
In today’s world, shoppers have come to expect multiple forms of payment. There are of course standard debit and credit cards, including less accepted cards such as American Express. The more payment options you can accept, the less likely that a lack of desirable payment options will lead to abandoned carts.
Other payment options such as Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Stripe are also pretty standard these days. So make sure you’re offering the most relevant and secure payment options.
Use Exit Intent Popups
Why not catch users as they are about to exit the page, with an incentive popup to encourage them to change their minds?
Exit popups are easy to create, and can be triggered to combat certain user actions including when users have items in their basket but aren’t heading towards the checkout.
Even if you can recoup 5% of all abandoned carts through a popup, that’s still better than letting sales slip away! Plus, exit popups are also a great way to collect signups for your newsletter, which may also generate sales down the line.
Improve Trust Signals
Sometimes users exit the page because they don’t trust your brand. This could be due to a lack of brand awareness, a lack of genuine reviews or even security concerns with the page itself.
Reviewing and improving user trust should be a priority for all ecommerce websites since nobody is going to enter their personal information into a website they don’t trust.
Continually Monitor & Address The Reasons Behind Abandoned Web Visits
Even if you have a very low abandoned cart rate, that’s not to say things can’t change. The best line of defence is to ensure you are constantly monitoring your website to identify and remedy any bottlenecks in the checkout process.
You can also send out surveys to users to get their feedback. This can highlight issues you didn’t even know about that could be losing you valuable business.
Keep investing in the performance and optimisation of your ecommerce site as a whole to maximise sales and ultimately your success.
Imaginaire – Discover Our Ecommerce Web Design & Marketing Services In Nottingham
It can be really challenging to pinpoint why your ecommerce website has a high abandoned cart rate, let alone employ the right fixes to turn things around.
Allow the ecommerce experts here at Imaginaire to help. We’re based in Nottingham and work with ecommerce brands from across the UK providing services such as ecommerce web design and digital marketing.
Let us know more about your abandoned cart issues along with your ecommerce business as a whole by getting in touch. You can also give us a call on 0115 697 1221.
From there, we can create a tailored range of solutions to help reduce instances of abandoned carts and ultimately improve conversions for your business.
