How to avoid cart abandonment on an eCommerce store?
Shopping cart abandonment is a global issue that has been creating problems in sales and conversions of numerous stores around the world. Even with passing time, the problem looms large over the eCommerce Stores. “The Remarketing report� prepared by the SaleCycle, a behavioral marketing company, shows the graveness of the situation. Here are the important insights regarding the same report.
As per the SaleCycle research on 500 leading global brands in the second quarter of the year 2016, the following crucial trends were observed. - The shopping cart abandonment was seen to be different for different regions of the world. While it was 74.0% for North American countries, the figure went a little higher for Latin American countries with 75.3%. Similarly, for European countries,
the cart abandonment rates were found to be 70.9% while it was 76.3% for the APAC countries. - The overall cart abandonment rate comprising of all the regions was found to be 74.52%. - Apart from the region, the shopping cart abandonment varied considerably as per the industries involved. The rate of shopping cart abandonment for retail was found to be 74.6%, 80.1% for travel related industry and 68.8% for fashion-specific industries. According to another eCommerce report by Statista, a statistics portal company, the shopping cart abandonment is based on a number of factors and problems faced by the online shoppers on an eCommerce store. The list of all the factors that lead to abandoned carts on an online store is explained in the statistical graph as shown below:
Being familiar with the impact of shopping cart abandonment across regions, user
experience, sales, conversions and the wide range of industries, the problem can’t be left ignored at all. Here are some of the tips that can help in reducing the shopping cart abandonment on an online store. 1. Reduce overhead expenses on your store-
In a competitive business environment, the availability of products at an appealing price is the only thing that can drive conversions and sales in bulk. However, the cost of a product is often increased by the unknown overhead expenses that are present on an eCommerce site. Some of the common examples of the overhead expenses on an online store are online transaction charges levied by third party payment gateways, credit card transaction fee, order processing fee, commission amount charged by online marketplaces and other such expenses. No doubt, it is impossible to run a business on a non-profit basis for any online store but certainly, there are a number of ways to reduce the overhead expenses. You can perform the following steps for controlling overhead expenses on an eCommerce store. - Encourage synchronization between the supply chain and end-user. - Find ways to handle “stuck” products in your store inventory. - Minimize the production cost by implementing various cost-cutting measures. - Better show the customers the extra costs right at the beginning when the user sees the products, rather than surprising them with a new cost on the checkout page. You may run A/B Test using various tools available in the market to see how the customers respond to the costs shown on the product page vs showing the same first time on the checkout page. Check out the difference in the conversion rates as shown
below.
2. Enhanced functionality of your shopping cart- There are times when customers are not cent percent sure about whether to purchase a product, explore other possible alternatives, wait for the prices to come down, make changes in the quantity of product before finally making the checkout. In all these scenarios, the buyer needs to make changes in the shopping cart without facing any difficulty for enjoying a better online shopping experience. It is important to have a shopping cart that is capable of performing cart changes in a quick manner. Some of the key features that need to be present in an eCommerce platform for optimizing the online shopping experience are described below: It needs to offer large, detailed and functional images of the products. Easy and quick navigation facility for a better online shopping experience. Allows quick product purchase through a single page checkout process. Functionality to include product reviews from customers. Better searching for easy product availability on the site. Ability to include discount coupons and gift cards for customers. Facilitates easy product import and export facility. For example, there are eCommerce platforms like OpenCart that offers a wide range of shopping cart functionalities mentioned above for improving the online shopping experience of customers. Utilize the functionality of this shopping cart for encouraging more customers towards your online store. Take a dashboard view of OpenCart platform that allows store owners to perform desired functions on their eCommerce site.
Do accept the status quo, always try and enhance the experience for the customers. If you are on standard shopping carts you may use Shopping Cart extensions and Checkout Extensions, otherwise, you may get the custom implementation for your website. 3. Improve the loading time of your online store-
As per the recent report of Hosting Facts, “A single second delay in your website loading time can result in a 7% loss in conversion, and 40% of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load�. This statement itself explains that people are not patient enough when it comes to the website loading time. The average loading time of a website is said to be around 2-3 seconds which can keep the customers engaged, otherwise, the visitor is sure to leave a site. This is definitely a huge setback for eCommerce store owners as a slow loading website can’t hurt their conversions and sales. In order to improve the loading time of your eCommerce site, following site optimization techniques need to be implemented
at the earnest level. - Minimize the number of HTTP requests to avoid delay in website loading. - Compress and optimize large size images for your eCommerce site with the help of image and data compression tools/programs like Gzip, JPEG Optimizer, TinyJPG, Caesium and such others. - Enhance the utility of your CSS files by eliminating browser specific codes and applying shorthand codes. - Minify the site resources for displaying website content quickly for faster loading and response time of websites. There are various tools like Pingdom, WebPageTest.org, PageSpeed Insights and others that can improve the website loading speed. 4. Enhance the website design and accessibility across multiple devices- The global pattern of online shopping has changed drastically with the more number of purchases on an online store made through mobile devices instead of desktops and laptops. To understand the above scenario, the number of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) shipped worldwide is estimated to a total of 343.3 million as per the Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report of International Data Corporation (IDC) for the second quarter of the year 2016. To target such a huge mobile based users, you need to take required steps to make your website accessible and userfriendly on various devices and screen types. Below are some of the quick fixes that can make your site more accessible and user-friendly. - Use web development technologies like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and mobile responsiveness for better site reach and performance. - Enhance the usability of CTA button on mobile devices by selecting an appropriate size and placement. - Include optimized and reduced page size for mobile content. If you want to understand the importance of web design in eCommerce, here is the example for you. Take a look at these two mobile designs that will provide a complete insight into a good and bad mobile website design and their impact on the conversions of a website. A good mobile website design encourages customers to browse a website whereas a bad mobile website design completely deviates a visitor and results in shopping cart abandonments along with bounce rates for an eCommerce store.
5. Make checkout process simplified-
People prefer to shop online due to the ease of purchasing products, variety of options available at a place, option of product delivery at customer’s premises and much more. However, if this is robbed from online shoppers, it is certainly going to affect the sales of an online store. An easy and quick checkout process encourage online shoppers to make a product purchase through a particular eCommerce site. So, ignoring it would be the biggest mistake for any eCommerce store owners. To improve the checkout process, you need to provide accurate product status, one page checkout process, quick cart customization facility, availability of contact details, easy product return requests, social login facility, the addition of security and trust badges and other such perks to customers. Here is a checkout page of the website Art.com that simplifies the online shopping experience of the customers by providing various features and functionalities.
6. Bring back abandoned carts through customer re-targeting- Email Marketing can take your business to a long way by encouraging customers to complete their pending shopping orders and can provide you promising results in terms of conversions. These emails are also an important tool for customer re-targeting provided they are engaging, sent at a regular interval of time and provide customers enough reasons to complete their pending shopping orders. ECommerce store owners need to schedule reminder emails to customers at a regular interval of time in order to remind them about their abandoned shopping carts. They can take the help of email marketing software like MailChimp, ConstantContact, GetResponse, AWeber and others that can provide contact details of customers for better customer re-targeting. 7. Offer products at an affordable price-
When the competition is too high in a particular business segment, it makes sense to present your products in the most competent manner. You need to have a clear idea about the price of your competitors and should reprice your products accordingly. Once, the customers will find your products as most affordable, they will love to buy from your online store irrespective of the competitors available in the market. In case, you wish to involve customers directly in the pricing strategies, there are certain eCommerce Extensions that can help customers make a wish about their product price. In this way, eCommerce store owners can directly know about the interested price segment of their targeted customers. 8. Add multiple payment and shipping options-
At the final checkout process, numerous online shoppers leave a site when they are unable to find their required payment and shipping options. This is a serious issue and has reduced the conversion rates and sales on various online stores to a significant level. To overcome this critical situation, store owners need to offer multiple payment and shipping options to reduce the rate of eCommerce abandoned carts. Make a list of the popular payment and shipping options by taking insight from the customer surveys and include them in your online store. Some of the well-known payment methods are PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Google Checkout, Wire Transfer, SagePay, Boleto and others. Similarly, you need to include these shipping options such as UPS, DHL, FedEx, USPS and much more to improve the online shopping experience. Conclusion The above options mentioned are not the only ones. There are more which can be worked about – some generic and some very much focused towards your target segment. Take the proactive steps now and perform some major makeover of your eCommerce site to reduce Abandoned Carts. It’s difficult to get the customers to your website as the first thing, and then seeing them leave without buying is even more painful. If Abandoned Cart implementations can boost up your website conversion
rate by 20% that clearly means bumped up sales. The best time to act on Abandoned Carts is now, do not miss it.