Eight Ways to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

This week’s post comes from Arun Sivashankaran, Chief Optimizer at FunnelEnvy, a conversion optimization, A/B testing and analytics consulting service provider.

Do You Know Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?

For most online retailers, shopping cart abandonment rates can range from 55 percent all the way up to 80.3 percent, with an average of 67.44 percent (Baymard Institute). That means the majority of shoppers who take the first step toward buying your products won’t complete the purchase (at least not the first time). Which leads us to another important question:

How Much Money Are You Losing from Abandoned Purchases?

Abandoned carts cost online retailers anywhere from $18 to $31 billion a year in lost sales. Listrak’s handy calculator shows you how much you could recoup if you decrease your abandonment rate.

Ecommerce merchants tend to believe that abandoned carts result from shoppers who waste their time. This is often not true. According to this infographic from Invesp, 81 percent of consumers research products online before deciding to purchase. And this infographic from SeeWhy demonstrates that a shopper who abandons a cart is more likely to make a purchase later than a shopper who never even reaches the shopping cart.

Optimizing your checkout process to decrease abandonment rates makes a dramatic difference in your bottom line.

You Can’t Fix Cart Abandonment If You’re Not Measuring It

It’s easy and free to measure shopping cart abandonment in Google Analytics. Just make sure you set up your conversion goals and funnels correctly. You can also look at your abandonment rate by segment, product type, or cart value to find more specific problems and opportunities to decrease abandonment and increase conversions.

Monitor your analytics tool frequently to understand your abandonment rate. This in-depth guide from KISSmetrics walks you through setting up goals and funnels in Google Analytics. Once you have created your conversion goals, you can start targeting and recovering these interested shoppers.

Eight Ways to Decrease Abandonment Rate

1. Make your site and checkout process mobile-friendly

According to Invesp’s research, 45 percent of online shoppers use their mobile devices to research and purchase online. With the growing demand and continuous innovations in smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology, you can expect that number to increase.

That means having a responsive design is more important than ever. Shoppers may trust your company and like your product, but if they can’t easily read and navigate your site, they’ll abandon your cart for a competitor’s mobile-friendly website.

2. Build trust with security information, testimonials and reviews

Buying online always carries an element of risk. You can reduce risk and assuage concerns of fraud, theft and spam by displaying lots of trust-building elements. Displaying the security credentials you have achieved indicates a secure and safe checkout process; testimonials build trust in your company and reviews indicate a quality product.

Security logos should be visible on every page of your website and prominently displayed on your checkout pages. Aim for at least one review on every product page, and testimonials on every page. FAQs also build trust and help separate browsers from buyers.

3. Reduce unexpected costs

One of the top reasons shoppers abandon their carts is because they reach the end of the checkout and find high shipping and taxes. While shipping doesn’t apply to digital products, reducing unexpected costs and fees helps retain interested buyers. Keep these costs as low as possible and be upfront on product pages. This also indicates transparency, which builds more trust.

4. Create urgency

Shoppers are more likely to complete a purchase if waiting means they won’t be able to get the product or a good deal. Urgency can be hard to create for digital products, but here some ideas to help you get started:

Sale price only valid until a certain date
Extra bonuses available to the first 500 buyers
Buying now guarantees a certain low cost

Urgency is best conveyed through copywriting, which means your message should be constantly refined and tested to discover the best-performing urgency techniques.

5. Offer loyalty benefits

Customers are often tempted to abandon the cart based on price. Instead of lowering your prices to compete, create a loyalty program. Benefits could range from a discount on the first order to extra bonuses like being the first to know about awesome new products. Just make sure your loyalty benefits actually provide some value to the customer.

6. Communicate customer satisfaction perks

Customer satisfaction perks are anything that shows how doing business with you is better than going to a competitor and helps shoppers feel confident buying now instead of later.

Attention drawing perks include:

Free and easy returns
Money-back guarantees
Live or fast support

7. Make your checkout process match your buyer personas and products

If your checkout process is too long, too short, too complicated, or otherwise doesn’t match the customer and the product, abandonment rates increase.

Only ask for the most critical information during checkout and test the length and complexity of the checkout process until you find the sweet spot that perfectly fits your buyers and products.

8. Invite customers to create an account AFTER purchasing, not before

Forcing shoppers to register first is a barrier to purchase, and often incites worries of spam. Waiting until the purchase confirmation to invite customers to create an account makes registration a benefit and capitalizes on their post-purchase euphoria. It also makes the checkout process shorter and smoother.

Keystone

While shopping cart abandonment costs you thousands, it can be reduced. Learn how to reduce abandonment to beef up your bottom line.

There’s still time to drive more Q4 revenue!

Download this guide to read our 5 conversion rate optimization pro tips.