Imagine the scene: you are shopping for groceries when suddenly you bump into a friend. You two start chatting and decide to go for a catch-up over coffee. Your items are now a second thought on your mind. Hours later, when you get home, you suddenly remember your shopping basket that is now sitting alone at some random aisle in the supermarket. Nevertheless, with all those groceries you still need.
However unlikely in the real world, this sort of thing always happens in the world of e-commerce. When surfing the web your customers not only have a wide array of options at the click of a button, they also have life distractions. This phenomenon is known as cart abandonment. So how can you help reduce the distraction of pop-up messaging apps, the latest trending topics on Social Media, new episodes of people’s favourite tv shows? All of these are in reality a potential cause of people leaving your website without making the final purchase.
While forgetting to conclude a sale can be a minor frustration for consumers, it is a sensitive issue for any online store. Irrespective of where or how it happens, cart abandonment is one of the major issues faced by online stores nowadays. More than that, studies point out that the bigger rates of abandonment your store have, the more your company is likely to struggle in the future.
But fret not, dear business owner. With the help of our trusted developers, designers, and marketers at Webbiz, you will have a clear way to avoid the issue and emerge victorious from this digital quagmire.
Cart Abandonment Rates and the True Problem
In the world of marketing and e-commerce, fewer there are but a few metrics are more important than the ones related to cart abandonment issues. This shows how prominent the problem is among online stores.
The average rate of cart abandonment sits at almost 70%. That is a humongous part of all sales that are left in the middle of the road. If we filter access by mobile devices only, this number jumps to more than 85%. The extra 15% are more likely due to an unfriendly design for smartphones, making the experience troublesome once we leave Desktop versions. With mobile taking over the internet experience as the top spot for accessing the web, this escalates from an issue to a major crisis.
10 tactics to Prevent Abandonment Issues on Your e-Commerce
There are many origins for this problem, but the root is the same: trust.
Trust is a difficult thing to earn, but an easy thing to lose. A badly designed online store can come across as insecure and cause potential customers to feel uneasy with providing their credit card info into your payment platform. If your website takes too long to load pages, or it presents shopping cart information in a manner that is not optimized for multiple screens and resolutions, the visual confusion and longer waiting times can decrease trust along the shopping process. Even your shipping methods can be detrimental to your trust score, so to speak. Using unproven or less-known delivery methods will raise suspicion, and even customers that closed the deal can have second thoughts on returning to your website.
Circling back to our example, even when you are only browsing and digital window shopping it can be boiled down to a trust issue – this time on the side of the consumer. While we cannot boost self-confidence for every person who enters your website, it is definitely in your hands to raise trust across the shopper’s experience on your e-commerce.
Here are the 10 quick steps to minimize cart abandonment:
- Ensure trust by associating with well-established security providers for your e-commerce website.
- Costumers are more likely to finish a purchase if they know how long the process will be. Adding a “progress bar” is a sure way of doing it so.
- Remind of the benefits of the products they aim to acquire through the bureaucratic steps. A simple screenshot of the goods they’ll get goes a long way.
- Diversify payment and delivery options – more than 75% of abandonment boils down to issues with those two steps of the purchasing process.
- Create a “save for later” option in your cart. That way, your team can easily know which carts are only browsing shoppers and which ones have the potential to close sales.
- Another large batch of cart drops are due to the mandatory sign-up process – creating the option for guest checkouts fix this issue.
- Shipping costs might kill a sale – be as upfront and clear with everything as you possibly can.
- Page loads are frustrating to all, but even more to people interested in spending money on your product. Optimise your platform!
- If you are giving away discount codes, make sure they work and your customers can use them properly.
- Remarket abandoned charts.
How to Regain Trust and Close Sales
The best way of fighting Cart Abandonment and recover trust is to have a platform ready for your customer’s every need. By focusing on optimisation and intelligent design, our team of web designers and developers is the best course of action to minimize any disruption.
Another way of assisting the customer in closing the deal is to highlight once carts are left mid-shopping. If you ever stopped an Amazon shopping with any products in your cart, you know what we are talking about. Using data analysis and a nurture stream, you can even develop strategies focused on different profiles of shoppers.
With Webbiz’s help, you can help your business revert any potential crisis. Contact us and let us achieve your goals together.