Like Me? Follow Me.
Before I worked in online marketing, whenever I heard the term 'shopping cart abandonment' I thought of the poor carts that are dumped so unceremoniously in supermarket aisles every week*. Sad, isn't it, when you're doing your weekly shop and you amble past a morose-looking cart that just contains some Shreddies and a pack of reduced smoked salmon. There's no one around, and the cart has been left at a 30 degree angle to the shelves, which can mean only one thing: the shopper has done a runner and the heartless swine didn't even care enough to reclaim their pound from the trolley.
This is obviously not the meaning of shopping cart abandonment that was intended. For our purposes, shopping cart abandonment refers to the scenario when online shoppers on e-commerce websites enter in to the checkout process for one or a number of products, but end up leaving the website before completing their purchase.
Tips for Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is a big problem for e-commerce websites - according to Baymard the average rate of cart abandonment on a site is as high as 63.86%. This is particularly frustrating, as you have done all the hard work in persuading the visitor, only for them to not go through with it at the last possible moment.
So what could web development experts do to increase the number of visitors completing their transactions, then?
- Transfer Delivery Costs to Original Price of Goods - 72% of those who abandon their shopping cart say it is due to high delivery prices. One way to counter this could be to transfer some of the cost of delivery to the price of the products. This means you will still get money needed to pay for the shipping, but the customer won't be put off by an unexpectedly big figure added on at the end of the checkout process.
- Make Checkout Process Less Complicated - 41% say they abandon their carts because it takes too long to check out. Only request the personal information that you really need and make the process as easy to complete as possible. Test it yourself and see whether you would grow impatient if you were a customer.
- Cookies - Many people like to browse, put items in their basket and then come back at a later time to finalise the transaction. You can make it easier for them to do this by using cookies on your site, which will mean the same products will be in the basket when the same visitor logs on later in their session. However, beware of new cookie regulations that will be enforced from May this year, which will mean that visitors must be aware if a website deploys cookies.
- Remove Banner Ads at Checkout Stage - Remove distractions from the checkout page - you'd be surprised at the number of people whose attention is diverted by banner adverts and then leave the page as a result.
- Show Visitors Your Checkout is Secure - Shoppers are likely to leave your site if they don't think it's secure when they hand over their credit card information. Dispel this fear by adding SSL certificates, security badges and privacy policies.
- Use Javascript Validation - Customers are often frustrated by outdated checkout pages that display a generic error message if a particular field has not been filled in correctly. However, a good web development company like I-COM will make use of what is known as client-side validation, so that if the customer has made a mistake filling out an address or credit card number, they will be told exactly where they went wrong, and won't have to write out all of the rest of the information they provided a second time.
- Guest Checkouts - Having to register as a member of a website is a reason for abandoning a shopping cart cited by 23% of shoppers. Providing the option of a guest checkout, where the customer doesn't need to sign up, could have a big impact.
- Use Magento - Magento is a popular e-commerce platform and has an extensive range of features and extensions not necessarily provided by other solutions. Other platforms might, for example, offer automatic invoicing but not a voucher code input field at checkout, while others may accept voucher codes, but not allow for automatic invoicing. What do you do if you want both? Magento allows you to pick and choose all the features you need to modernise your checkout and make it both comprehensive and easy-to-use. And this means it's extremely adaptable - perfect if your business changes over the years and you start selling different products. What's more, it was recently acquired by e-commerce giant eBay, so you can bet your bottom dollar it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
There are of course some reasons for shopping cart abandonment that you can't influence, such as people simply changing their minds and deciding to save money, or adding items into the shopping cart to compare the total price of the same product with that of another website. However, these tips should help make a difference.
Contact I-COM's E-Commerce Web Development Experts
If you want to find out more about how you can improve your e-commerce offerings and reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment on your website, get in touch with the experts at I-COM today.
Call 0844 704 6830 or complete our easy-to-use online contact form.
* This anecdote is absolutely false. Written for the purpose of having a pithy and mildly amusing opening paragraph for this post.
