9 Tricks for Lowering Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

9 Tricks for Lowering Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

In March 2014, researchers found that an average of 67.91% of online shoppers abandon their carts.

While ecommerce sites will never enjoy zero abandonment, there are tricks marketers can employ to encourage more shoppers to complete their purchases. Part of lowering the abandonment rate is figuring out exactly where in the shopping process people are leaving; it is not always during the actual checkout process. To get the most from your consumers, be certain to adhere to these online shopping best practices.

Transparent Pricing

Many online merchants try to hide pricing from shoppers. One way this is often done is requiring a shopper to add a product to their cart in order to see the price. Not only is this an annoyance to the visitor, it will lead to higher cart abandonment rates.

Clearly Indicate Availability

Another inconvenience to shoppers is learning that a product is out of stock when trying to checkout. Do not risk having the shopper abandoning their entire cart over one or two items being out of stock. Backordering is fine, but let them know that it will be back ordered — along with an expected arrival date — before they put it in their cart.

Shorten the Checkout Process

There is a big push towards one-page checkout. The sooner you implement one-page checkout on your own ecommerce store, the better. This simple trick alone can significantly lower your cart abandonment rate. If you absolutely must deploy a multi-page checkout, it should be no longer than three pages. Whether it is one-page or five, never make the customer enter correct details twice. Abandonment will go up if a shopper has to re-enter all of their details because one field did not pass validation. Going even further, use logins and cookies to pre-fill as much data as possible.

The Home Depot doesn't utilize a 1-page checkout process, however they make sure to display where in the checkout process the user is, and how far they have until they are finished.

Keep it Clean and Simple

Do not overwhelm your customers with product details. Sure, make them available, and provide enough information to encourage a sale, but use a tabbed container to hide details most consumers will not care about, like technical specifications. This will keep the page design clean while still allowing those who want to see the details to do so.

Use tabs on your product detail pages to hide technical information.

Enable Different Payment Methods

There is no sound business reason for not accepting payment through third party providers like PayPal and other digital wallets. Make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you using the method they prefer. Once enabled, feature these payment methods early in the shopping process so that customers know they can pay using them. Allow users to save preferred methods of payment for an even more seamless process the next time around.

Make sure to let your visitors know early on what types of payment methods you accept.

Use Remarketing

Remarketing can be done both on the web and by email. Remarketing by email is a great way of getting shoppers back to your site. Try different ways for wooing them back, such as emailing discounts or coupon codes. Remarketing on the web will place your ads in front of shoppers as they surf other sites. While they may not have been ready to purchase when they abandoned their cart, remarketing is a great way to stay top of mind. Since the user has already been introduced to your brand, your remarketing ads are more likely to catch their attention.

Instill Trust

A shopper that does not trust your site will not make a purchase. This is doubly true in an era of increasing theft of credit card details. If employing cookies, be sure to have a page explaining exactly what they do. Also have a page explaining your sites security features for those weary of providing their credit card details. Publish a clear and easy-to-understand privacy policy that explains to customers exactly what you will do with their private information and how you will protect it. Make sure to use an SSL certificate from a reputable source like verisign, and include a seal on your site to show that your data is encrypted. Customers are more at ease when seeing the logos of recognized brands, so if you are selling the products of these brands, put the customer at ease by using logos where appropriate.

Optimize

It is true that changing the color of a button or even moving it can increase sales and decrease abandonment rate. Use an A/B testing tool like Optimizely to A/B test everything on your site. Start with broad tests and narrow them to be more specific as you gather insights.

Speed it Up

Pageload speed not only affects your placement in Google, it can also drive away shoppers. Milliseconds matter. Do everything you can to speed up your site. You can keep an eye on page load times from inside Google Analytics in Content > Side Speed.

While the above tricks will not drop your cart abandonment rate to zero, implementing them should improve your overall metrics. Every ecommerce site deals with cart abandonment; the best proactively minimize the chance of it happening. At the end of the day, these tricks will lead to more transactions, sales and profit.

Customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate. Schedule a free consultation to learn how else a referral program can help you achieve your ecommerce goals.