5 Effective Ways To Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment

One of the toughest situations to handle for any business owner is shopping cart abandonment  that may come in unpredictable ways and lead to incurring massive losses. To understand how to make your customers finish their purchase, you need to work your way up to retaining your customers and devise strategies to help fight cart abandonment.

Online shopping, much like physical stores, can be a distracting experience with easier ways to put off things for later. What if a customer while shopping received a notification about the trailer release of a final episode of a show they like and left to come back again later? See, it’s that easy! If not monitored closely, these abandonments would only come causing more and more messy problems.

Reasons Why People Abandon Their Shopping Carts

Apart from the obvious reasons (like getting distracted by an Instagram DM), let’s look deeper into what causes such rampant shopping cart abandonment rates? The following are a few reasons:

• More than 56% of consumers say they leave midway because of pricing issues (mostly due to extra shipping costs, taxes involved): Most shoppers expect free shipping and delivery of their orders since larger retailers like Amazon, Walmart have these features as given. Therefore, working in a competitive way, these shoppers prefer buying the same items on these platforms to avail of cost-effective prices.
• More than 37% of customers leave their shopping carts because they were window-browsing: These customers do not understand the concept of listing their favorites and generally observed in festive seasons. They choose items based on their preferences and add it directly to their cart for the intention of future reference (like for price comparisons, or buying from a physical store).
• Around 21 to 25% of people leave their carts because either they find the entire payment and checkout process overcomplicated, or complain about it raising suspicion for their data’s usage.
• Prerequisite of an existing account: For first time or impulsive shoppers, anything that comes between their shopping experience can put them off shopping from your website – even when it means having a verified account on your website. As the individual is prompted to continue to place the order once their account setup is complete, it poses a barrier for many buyers.
• Product Quantity Restrictions: There are many brands and retailers who talk about crucial features like limited product quantity per adult, etc. Since these quantities are regulated and come with an added agony of getting the product again (if it’s a staple). It may occur due to several causes because of limited availability, government regulations, etc.

How To Go About It?

It has been found that there are a lot of reasons underlying a shopping cart abandonment, which can appear to be miscellaneous on the surface but point to one common thread of lack of adequate trust in your customers. Therefore, it’s wise to take steps in order to increase user trust in your store.

According to reports, more than 31.8 million customers underwent major and minor credit card security breaches in 2014 thus making them conspicuous of online shopping from brands big and small. Create a transparent, verified, and valid payment gateway and billing process that instills security in the conscience in their minds as they shop. These can be the littlest of things like placing right logos on your website, to getting a foolproof SSL certificate for your entire website.

Using trust symbols like PayPal Verified, Norton-Protected, etc can come as a relief for your customers from having second thoughts. Sometimes, customers prefer certain payment methods better than others, so make sure you include as many of these for further conveyance. Apart from all these, here are some of the more (proven) ways in which you can significantly lower your shopping cart abandonment rates:

1. Exit-Intent Popups – They Work!

For business owners recording rampant shopping cart abandonments, these pop-ups serve as a great way to keep your customers intrigued enough to complete through the entire process. These pop-ups can accompany a coupon code for your customers that can be about an exclusive, additional discount (within a limited timeframe) and can be quick to install on any page. A good example of these unique popups can be:

Credits: UseProof

2. Absolutely No Surprises – Transparent and Honest Billing

If you’re just starting out, you can still work around ways without providing free shipping that can help your customers complete their purchase. One of these methods can be providing your customers with a completely transparent interface with especially itemized billing like shopping, taxes, and fees, right before they proceed to the payment page. A lot many customers may not prefer last-minute surprises to come to take them when they’re least expecting it on their final bill.

3. Allow Guest Checkouts – For First-Time Customers

Not all your customers are going to signup with you at their very first shopping instance. Moreover, many customers shop first to decide if your products are worth their time and investment. In such cases, it can be a wise option to allow a guest checkout option. This way, it’s a win-win for both parties as your customers get their privacy and you achieve lesser cart abandonment issues. Prominent platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce come equipped with such functionalities and prove to be handy for online store owners.

4. Provide a Sleek Checkout Processes

The last thing your customers want is a slow, faulty checkout process that takes ages to go through. Instead, it should go seamless and help your customers complete their order payment fast and secure. The lesser the number of intermediate loops, the happier your customers are. In fact, using the option ‘remember me’ in the checkout page, lets the page store your name, shipping address, billing details (except their credit card credentials) for auto-filling the page next time and thus, speeding up the entire process.

5. Display Product Details – Complete with Product Thumbnails

The order summary, along with small product icons in the final checkout page can serve as a remainder or mental note for your customers to learn the products they’ve purchased in the order. It also can help them remember if they’re missing out on any important feature (like sizes, quantity) or sometimes even forgetting any product altogether. It also helps in establishing trust in your customer’s mind since it represents that the store owner cares for its customers.

Conclusion

To each its own, and for customers that can mean many different elements working together as one. While rampant cart abandonment can lead to frustrating and time-consuming experiences, it may also be a cue for you to level up your brand’s social proof in:

• Following up with customers via emails and asking them to leave product reviews
• Feature their reviews on your website, and share with them the links to your social media pages
• Keep them looped in to draw attention to sales, discounts, or other new features and updates to your store.
• Don’t over-send emails or notifications, that can cause counterproductive issues.

In case of a more personalized, and customer-oriented approach, I’d recommend seeking out the expert eCommerce development services at CodeClouds. Their exhaustive experience with integrating sticky.io and other CRMs with Shopify and Klaviyo can be a real boost for maximizing your online conversions.