Top 4 Simple & Effective Ways To Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment

The eCommerce market is not only thriving but its forecasted that by 2040, more than 95% of all purchases will be made online. Despite this huge market opportunity, lots of onlineretailers experience a major challenge i.e. shopping cart abandonment. Many store owners say this is an external nemesis for their successful business growth.

Isn’t it frustrating for you as a business owner to observe your potential clients move through the sales funnel but at the end lose them? All the effort you put towards increasing the conversion through enticing offers, create compelling product pages or landing pages has gone in vain.

It might interest you to know that Baymard Institute conducted a study in 2020 which showed an average cart abandonment rate of 69.57%. To interpret this, around 7 out of 10 customers don’t complete their purchase online. This is indeed an annoyance. If we dig a little deeper, the statistics are even more shocking. Mobile users have got whooping abandonment rate of 85.65%. So, this article will address key reasons for cart abandonment and strategies that you can implement to combat this issue.

“Only 2.86% of eCommerce website visits convert into a purchase”.

So, what is “shopping cart abandonment”? And why should you as an eCommerce owner need to be concerned about”?

  Shopping cart abandonment in eCommerce is the term used to describe a potential customer visiting your webpage then adding the item to his/her cart but exits before the desired action is taken place (purchasing a product). Revenue and sales are the 2 key aspects that decide your business's future and if an external threat is impacting that- oh yes! It's of concern to you. Ecommerce brands lose US$18 billion in sales revenue each year solely due to cart abandonment. This has become a burning issue and you cannot ignore this anymore. 

Online shoppers are most likely to abandon their carts due to extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees).

Apart from these reasons, customers also abandon their cart due to delayed information about shipping and handling cost, window shopping, preferred payment option not listed during checkout and site performance issues.

So, let's not delay further and address the strategy to combat this challenge.

Solution 1: Understanding Why Your Customers Abandoned Their Cart

One of the best ways to understand your customer is to ASK them. You can implement an “exit intent survey” when the user is about to leave the page through an eye-tracking system.

Some examples of your exit-intent survey:

Based on the exit intent survey results, you will be able to create a table that can lead you to understand the real scenarios why carts are abandoned.

Target those reasons which has got the highest count and prepare 3-5 potential fixes. Lets say, high shipping and handling cost is the main problem area for you. So, you can:

·         Show visitors with additional shipping options

·         Include the shipping cost on your product and promote “free shipping”

·         Promote by saying free shipping with conditions apply (free for orders above $X)

·         Avoid adding any additional hidden costs in the checkout process

Solution 2: Optimizing Your Checkout Process

Your website should be at ease for your customers to checkout and this is where optimizing your onlinestore and seamless shopping experience becomes very critical in providing on the site. Firstly, provide a roadmap throughout the sales funnel. By doing so, potential customers will be able to visually see the whole process and can even motivate them to complete their purchase.

Secondly provide thumbnails of your products throughout the checkout. This will assist the buyers to re-ensure what they are going to buy and provides a visually pleasing checkout process. Imagine a person walking to a brick & mortar store, he/she can touch and feel the product. While this cant is implemented during the online purchase, the thumbnails can especially be useful in keeping the products top of your customer`s mind. In addition to this, providing an instant buy or quick buy option can reduce the shopping time significantly. In other words, minimizing the number of page changes or clicks can make a huge difference in the cart abandonment rate.

Thirdly, in 2020, 28% of the people abandoned their shopping cart because the website wanted to create an account. In order to tackle or eliminate this issue, provide a guest checkout option for your potential customers. Yes! Collecting their details is a value add for future marketing purposes but that shouldn’t impact on your sales. However, if you still want to have this as an option, you can prompt your visitor to save their details during their last step of the checkout process. 

Last but no way least is your website performance and load time. If your website is secure and fast the probability of customers completing the whole process is higher. Faster load time also directly correlates with higher satisfaction among your potential customers. Its understandable that eCommercesites will have tons of product images but they all need to be optimized for the load speed. So, ensure you regularly keep your online shop updated and provide a bug-free platform. The below graph illustrates the impact of the checkout.

“A Fully Optimized Checkout Flow Can Have as Few as 12 Form Elements and 7 Form Fields”- Sleeknote

Solution 3: Providing Flexible & Quicker Checkout For Your Customers   

As you are into ecommerce, the more payment options you provide for your potential customers, the better. Put yourself in their shoes, if you don’t provide their preferred means of payment then they just bounce out from the website. Moreover, visitors don’t have time to enter the details while checking out. So, if the user has already registered himself/herself ensure those data is automatically populated while moving through the purchase funnel. Doing so will enable in eliminating a step in the purchase flow. 

Solution 4: Get Interactive With Your Potential Customers

While surfing through your ecommerce website, customers for sure will get doubts about the product variations, brands, availability etc. So, replicating the store environment on your ecommerce site with the same level of care and attention through your online customer support, you would be able to accomplish your goal. An online chat option can help you interact and assist the visitor when struck thus positively impacting your abandonment rate.

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