Every eCommerce business’ nightmare — ”Shopping Cart Abandonment”
A potential customer has just visited your website, browsed through their desired categories, viewed a product page and what’s more? They have also added one or more products to the shopping cart.
And then, all of a sudden, the customer walks out.
Leaving behind their shopping cart full of items and without completing the order. Well, it’s an extremely common behaviour. Around, 67% of online shoppers do that.
So, what went wrong? Maybe your eCommerce website has certain flaws. So, the first and foremost solution is to develop a flawless eCommerce website. You can do that by hiring a eCommerce development company and it will definitely solve half of your woes.
While, every single customer is different, but, on the whole, the buying habits of customers are similar, which is why the shopping cart abandonment rate is so high.
So, why do customers leave their purchase midway? Here are the top 3 reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart:
- Complex navigation
- The checkout process is long
- Lack of Call to Action
- Absence of a remarketing strategy
Although there are several other reasons why customers walk away, these were the top three reasons. So, how to tackle this problem?
Here are a few measures to help you tackle this problem:
1. Effortless navigation between the cart and the store
Reducing friction during the checkout process makes is also one of the hardest things to get right.
The easier you make it for consumers to move between the cart and store, more is the probability of them sticking around, which will ultimately lead to them buying and checking out with the product.
While designing the checkout page, apply the same web navigation strategy which you have used throughout the website.
The navigation should be such that it is easier for the customers to save the items in their cart and come back if they want to.
Never force the users to click the back button during the checkout process. If your checkout page is designed that way, you need to rectify that as soon as possible. This is where eCommerce development comes in place.
Thus, creating a smooth navigation between the shopping cart and an eCommerce store is the most effective way to reduce cart abandonment rate.
2. Enable guest checkout option
When you force your visitors to create an account before checking out, it slows down the entire checkout process. So, don’t make it mandatory for users to create an account to check out.
Even after coming to this point, most of the customers prefer to leave or abandon their cart rather than creating an account, right from the beginning.
But, obviously, creating an account is beneficial from the marketing point of view. So, how do you go about it?
You can make registration optional but come up with a prompt which will remind the users of the advantages of creating an account. In this manner, you can satisfy both type of customers- the ones who willing to go ahead with the loyalty programme concept and also the ones who don’t want to sign up.
There is one more thing which you can do. Ask customers to create an account after they complete their purchase listing the benefits of having an account like order tracking, help desk access and discount offers on the next purchase.
3. Include a strong Call to Action on your checkout page
Call to action buttons has one particular goal — To get the website visitor clicking and complete the conversion.
But, many eCommerce websites are under the false impression that if a customer has added a product in their cart, they no longer need to include calls to action on their checkout page. Many a time, this leads to the customer, abandoning the cart and moving on to something else.
Whereas, if you add a call to action button on the checkout page of your eCommerce website, it will actually push the user to complete the purchase, rather than leaving it midway.
Also, don’t forget that your main aim is to provide a smooth and user-friendly experience for the customer. So, be careful not to impose confusing and unclear call to action buttons on your checkout page.
Don’t include confusing words like ‘Continue; or ‘Return’. Use active, consistent, friendly and connective words, instead, which will help the visitors to comprehend and get a clear picture of what is expected out of them.
4. Send emails reminding about the abandonment
If a customer leaves their cart at the end of checkout, there’s a good chance that you have their email address. Don’t let that go waste and use it to your advantage.
Send them a reminder via email, immediately after they leave. Follow it up with additional emails for the next few days.
While sending the reminder email, Include all the items they left in the cart along with a call to action button. It might prompt the customer to come back to your eCommerce website and complete the order.
If that still doesn’t work, after a couple of days, you can send them an email offering them a discount on the series of products, they were interested in, to provoke a sale.
With Google Analytics you can easily scale your remarketing emails to track the ROI.
Endnote:
Shopping cart abandonment is an obstacle which you cannot get rid of completely. But, that doesn’t mean you should not take any measures to reduce the abandonment rate. Even a small percentage of reduction in shopping cart abandonment goes a long way in boosting the sales for your eCommerce store. Nowadays, many businesses are using artificial intelligence to make their eCommerce business successful.
Apart from all the strategies mentioned above, there are three more measures which can help your business a lot. You can :
- Emphasize the security of your eCommerce site
- Prioritize the customer needs and function accordingly
- Ask the user for feedback when they abandon the cart
As they say, a little goes a long way! It holds true for boosting the sales for your eCommerce business as well.