If you run an online store, you always want to maximize your conversions by turning visitors to the site into buying customers.
But there will always be those who place items in a shopping cart and then disappear. According to Statista.com, in the first quarter of 2018, the global online shopping cart abandonment rate was 75.6 percent. That’s a lot of online retail orders abandoned instead of purchases being made.
As a business owner, imagine taking advantage of another 75.6 percent of shoppers. To improve your sales, it’s important to know why people leave your site before purchasing, and to fix the problems that are causing the abandonment.
You want to make all efforts to prevent shoppers from abandoning their cart, and instead turn them from potential buyers into buyers. After all, it’s more efficient to maximize sales to existing visitors to your site than try to find completely new site visitors and convert them.
So to do that, let’s look at how you can calculate and improve your eCommerce abandonment rate.
What is Abandonment?
Just so we’re all on the same page, let’s do a quick definition of shopping cart abandonment.
Calculated as a percentage, it’s the number of online shoppers who add items to a virtual shopping cart and then “abandon” the cart (leave the website) before completing their purchase. This can show you the rate of interested and potential customers who leave your site without buying anything, compared to the total number of shopping carts created.
To calculate your abandonment rate, you divide the total number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created on your site. For instance, if your site had 50 completed purchases and a total of 200 carts created, your abandonment rate would be 75 percent.
|
1 – (50/200) x 100 = 75% |
You need to be sure you’re tracking these numbers so that you can make the calculations. There are tools available to you, such as in Google Analytics, but we won’t get into that detail in this post.
Once you know your abandonment rate, the number can help you better understand your customers’ behavior and give you indications of your checkout process and its faults. As well, decreasing that percentage will help you increase revenue.
Why Are Customers Abandoning Your Cart?
There are a multitude of reasons that customers abandon shopping carts, and we’re going to look at how you can minimize problems from two different perspectives.
First, how can you fix the shopping process to minimize abandonment before shoppers check out? In other words, how do you prevent abandonment from happening in the first place?
Second, we will look at implementing a strategy to follow up with customers after they abandon their cart, to get them back to your site and purchasing what they were interested in (or anything else). After all, despite your best efforts, there will still be abandoned carts. You just want to be sure you get those customers back shopping again.
Fixing the Shopping Process
Let’s start by looking at the top reasons that customers abandon their cart before purchasing, and with that information in hand, the improvements you can make to minimize abandonment.
1. Add a Progress Bar
A long and complicated checkout process is a top reason for abandonment. Besides taking steps to keep the process simple, you should add a progress bar that sets expectations for customers and lets them know exactly where they are in the process. This will help them understand where they are and approximately how long it will take them to finish. Without that information, they may just get frustrated and leave, thinking it will take forever to finish. An example is below.
| Checkout Progress | ||||
| Sign In | Shipping | Billing | Review | Payment |
Make the checkout process, and the checkout progress bar, as simple and clear as possible, with as few steps as you can. This makes it look and feel quick and easy, and will keep people moving toward purchasing.
2. Instill Trust
Despite the fact people are more accustomed than ever to making purchases online, they are still careful about ensuring online protection with a secure payment system.
To ensure customers feel safe purchasing from you, display security credentials and logos with the online shopping form. Stating “100% secure” with a secure payment system logo will go a long way to encouraging customers to enter their credit card information and purchase from your eCommerce store. Of course, you need to ensure you have a secure payment system in place.
3. Display clear “Call-To-Action” buttons
Make it easy for customers to buy by providing a clear call-to-action button in the checkout phase. These buttons can be only a few words, and will walk the customers through the buying process, reinforcing to them that they are going the right direction and progressing through the correct steps.
A brightly colored, clear button that tells the customer the next step, such as “Pay Securely Now,” or “Proceed to Checkout,” will help your site display a logical process that helps people proceed smoothly through their purchase.
4. Be transparent with all costs
Extra, unexpected costs are one of the top reasons for abandonment. This can include shipping or other additional fees that appear at the end of the process. Customers develop a lack of trust when they think they are paying one cost, only to discover additional fees.
Avoid breaking that trust by displaying all costs upfront. You can also consider making shipping free and instead building that cost into the pricing for your product. Or you can offer free shipping if a certain amount of product is purchased, for instance over $50 worth of product.
Don’t forget about currency exchange, which should be displayed if possible and applicable, so customers know what the final total will be when they receive their credit card bill.
5. Offer a Guest Checkout
For a variety of reasons, there are a lot of people who don’t want to create an account, devising yet another user name and password, to buy something online. Therefore, adding that extra amount of time and effort will make some people abandon the shopping process entirely. It’s a good idea to have the option to purchase as a guest.
While you want to make it simple for the customer, don’t forget to gather the details you need to complete the purchase. You want to collect basic information like an email address, to contact the customer in the future and encourage additional purchases. Once the customer has made a satisfactory purchase, you can continue to communicate with them and perhaps they will want an account, want to join a loyalty program, or just continue to buy as a guest.
Getting Customers Back
Those are five relatively simple fixes or improvements you can make to the shopping process to help reduce the chance of abandonment. But it will still happen. So let’s look at some strategies to get those customers back once they’ve left their cart behind without buying.
1. Email Marketing
Ensure you get the customer’s email address at some point in the process, and you will be able to contact them and re-market the shopping cart contents.
There are several ways to gather their email address. Customers would be accustomed to providing some details when they first click to begin the checkout process. At that point, you could capture their name and email address. You can then save that information in your database and use it to contact customers if they abandon their cart.
As well, you could provide one last request for an email address as the customer is “abandoning” the checkout process. Consider a popup with a polite request that they leave their email address just in case they change their mind and later want to return to purchase the item.
With the information on the customer stored, you can then do a remarketing email campaign. Send a reminder of the item left in the cart, with images of the item and price, and a call to action and link to allow the customer to return to the cart. The first email should be within 24 hours of abandonment, and you can send subsequent emails as well.
2. Use Advertising
Retargeting with the use of advertisements is a second way to regain customers. There are companies that specialize in these ad retarget systems, in which an advertisement for the product just abandoned appears to the customer online.
People don’t always convert on the first look at the product, so an additional view will help. These are highly targeted and can be very effective, because the customer has already shown interest in the product that appears in the advertisement.
Final Thoughts
Shopping cart abandonment happens for a wide variety of reasons, some of which are not in your control. But there are steps to take that are in your control, to improve the conversion rate of your eCommerce sales.
After calculating your abandonment rate, and then following the easy steps we’ve detailed, you will be able to easily improve your eCommerce abandonment rate and thereby increase the sales and bottom-line profits for your business.
Author Bio: Callum Mundine is part of the marketing team at oneegg.com.au. He is an Amazon marketplace & white hat link building specialist, and has launched multiple successful brands on Amazon.com. Callum likes his eggs boiled.
Share
