Which is your Preferred Method of Shopping?
Do you prefer taking yourself to the store or do you do it online? If you do it online, have you left a cart unattended to?
You have most likely had an experience where you had to abandon your cart after a fantastic experience shopping online. This must have been due to various factors, including long checkout processes.
Shopping cart abandonment is a significant problem facing eCommerce stores. In this article, we will intensely discuss improving your customer’s checkout experience to reduce the high cart abandonment rate.
What is checkout abandonment? This refers to clients adding items to their cart from your eCommerce store and leaving the website before checkout.
What is Checkout Abandonment?
Checkout abandonment refers to buyers visiting a website intending to purchase items but leaving midway or just before they complete the process. The checkout abandonment rate is high, as there are quite a several reasons that contribute to this, as discussed below.
It is essential to calculate your checkout abandonment rate to enable eCommerce business people to establish how their business is doing and to enlighten them on what areas to improve to improve clients’ conversation rates.
Reasons for Cart Abandonment
There are many reasons why customers abandon their carts, and we would like to preview the most common reasons through this article.
- Distraction: Something as small as a text message or a phone call is enough to get the client away from your store. In most cases, they don’t come back after leaving the site.
- Long checkout process: I am ordering online because I need more time to go to the store. If anything, I want something that ends in no time. A lengthy checkout process will guarantee you lose clients.
- Extra shipping costs: Unnecessary or somewhat prohibitive- make customers rethink their decisions and conclude the price is not worth it. This causes them to abandon the cart.
- Lack of many payment options: If your store has only a limited payment method, it is likely not to attract good customer feedback while others cannot complete their orders.
- Lack of a return or refund policy: For every new client who stomps on your website, their first interest is checking your return policy after loading their cart. If it doesn’t favor them, they abandon the cart.
- Vague return or refund policy: most people will develop the concern of; what if they deliver something else from what I ordered? Will I be in a position to return or get a refund? You as the website owner, you have to have a valid return policy which if absent, could be a major reason as to why a customer may abandon their cart.
- Do you ensure your clients that their card details are safe in your website? Safety of their personal information is very crucial. If your website does not provide security badges to assure that, be sure many are abandoning their carts!
These are the most common reasons customers are most likely to abandon their cart before checking out.
What is the Importance of Optimising Your Shopping Cart?
Why should I even bother optimising my shopping cart? In simple terms, we call it customer satisfaction, as discussed below.
These percentages are more prone to affecting the numbers in the business if one does not optimise their clients shopping carts.
Shopping cart optimisation is essential as it keeps the eCommerce store on its toes. Once a customer begins to add products to their cart and leaves, that leaves a lot of questions.
This should immediately signal that there is more than the customer expected, and they need help finding it on that checkout page. It is an urgent need to be looked into to avoid losing another customer.
Let’s get into How to Optimise Your Customer’s Checkout Experience
Now that we have familiarized ourselves with the possible reasons for clients abandoning their checkout process, here are a few ways how you can improve their experiences while shopping with you.
1. Offer Guest Checkout Option
At the checkout point, some businesses will force you to create an account to complete checkout.
Despite the urge to grow your business and have more customers, there are better ways than just demanding a customer create an account to purchase products. Let first-time customers have the ability to checkout as guests; as they return, they sure will need an account to enjoy discounts.
Giving customers the option of checking out as guests even enhances their trust in your website, as people are reluctant to give out their personal information anywhere.
2. Create Editing Buttons on the Website
An online shopper is more prone to change their minds or go for a different product with a discount, but it serves a similar purpose. Ensure that your website offers an editing button so customers can easily adjust their cart to their preferences before checkout.
This also allows them to add more items and checkout once instead of repeating the same process if they want to add another item to their cart.
3. Offer a Variety of Payment Methods
Ensure that your company offers utmost all the standard methods of payment. Limited payment methods end up degrading your company, losing its value to people with time.
Offering a variety of payment methods is a great way to accommodate as many clients as possible, as there is no hustle when it comes to checking out. Many people are forced to abandon their carts despite their urgency to want to access your products simply because their most comfortable payment method needs to be provided in your listing of payment methods allowed by your website.
4. Let Your Checkout Page be as Simple as Possible
Being the last step before purchasing a product, your checkout page should be as simple and precise as possible.
Focus only on the necessary forms to be filled during this stage and avoid as much as possible anything to draw your customer’s attention. Make the checkout process as fast and as easy as possible. This saves time for the client and ensures they return.
5. Unnecessary Information, Avoid it!
During this stage, ensure you only ask for information on how the product will reach the customer.
At this stage, the customer is only interested in filling in details to help deliver their products; too much unnecessary information might raise security alarms or even lead to cart abandonment.
The more steps, the more time the customer is prone to spend on the website, which is against their wishes.
6. Introduce Auto Save
An aspiring customer might get distracted and aim at coming back to complete their purchase. If they have already selected the items, let your website automatically save their selection for the next visit.
This helps the client save time compared to if they are coming to start a brand new selection.
7. Communicate Effectively on Delivery
Clients will likely abandon their cart at the checkout point if new and unplanned delivery costs meet them. Instead, ensure that your website indicates delivery fees and methods used from the beginning.
Alternatively, you could offer free delivery for a specific price on achieving the target or find alternative ways to incorporate the shipping fee in the prices, enabling you to offer free delivery to all clients.
8. Offer Alternative Delivery Methods
Clients are different, so is the urgency to use what they are trying to purchase from you. Customers will move from one website to another to find one that will deliver their products fastest if needed. Have different packages to favor those who urgently need their boxes.
Make it possible for a customer to receive their package in less than a day after their purchase so that it may be in the position to fulfill its purpose.
9. Offer Customers Identification When Making Errors
Design a website that guides your customers on what is needed and alerts them when they need to fill in the requirements.
This helps customers discover what is needed early enough to smoothen the checkout process.
10. Use Indicators to Show the Client their Progress
Most online shoppers are there for a short time, and most want to check out as soon as possible.
Ensure your website shows progress, so the customer knows how many more steps it takes to complete the checkout process. The indicators also help clients correct errors before the final stage to prevent unnecessary costs of tracking orders.
11. Ensure Your Website has a Previous Functioning Button
Now, assuming you realize you made a mistake when you are on the last page just before checkout. As if that’s not enough, your website has no back button.
Are you willing to restart the whole process over a missing button?
At this stage, most will abandon their cart and visit another website. To avoid this, ensure your previous page button works to allow your customer to navigate between pages before final checkout.
12. Ensure You are Using the Same Domain from the Beginning to the End
Keeping in mind that this is an online purchase, trust issues quickly build up over the pettiest things immediately after they don’t make sense.
When a new customer starts checking out and there is a change of websites, they need to complete that purchase. To prevent such incidences, ensure you are using the same website.
13. Create a Cart Summary
The last page of the checkout should offer a summary of what the customer has ordered. This summary should include all the details, including the addresses, to give the client the last chance to preview and confirm the information provided.
Make sure to indicate all the items purchased, their prices, and the final prices with all other extra costs included.
14. Ensure your Website has Reliable Chat Support
There is no limit to what time one decides to purchase items online. Ensuring your live chat is active at all moments guarantees clients that you value them. If your customer wants to know specific details about a particular product, they are sure they will get the information they need.
A live chat will help the customer get all the information they need almost immediately instead of having to call or email to get the information they need on the products they want to purchase.
15. Build Trust with your Customers
Trust between a business owner and a customer takes work. Especially, in this case, most people are strangers, and for others, it’s their first time shopping from your website. Building such a relationship is quite challenging but ensuring that your website uses security logos and trust marks is one way of easing the tension.
Using these ease a customer, and they are sure they have nothing to worry about when they insert their card numbers for payments. You could also provide the company’s contacts on the website. It helps with assuring the clients that your website is reliable.
16. Consider Mobile Shoppers Too
While coming up with your website, make sure it is compatible with cell phones. Over 50% of orders are proven to be made through phones, so making your checkout page mobile-friendly ensures that you reach a bigger audience.
Ensure that the writing is easy to read and the images are big enough, or else the level of cart abandonment keeps increasing.
17. Place a Cart Button and Icon on All Pages
The moment you spot what you have been scrolling over for, you first want to add it to the cart. The interested party might leave the website if your page indicates where the coach is.
To avoid this, ensure that there is an “add to cart” button on every page, which is quite conspicuous to save the clients the struggle of having to again look for it.
18. Give an Option of Saving the Cart
Once a client adds their products to their cart, ensure that there is an option of saving the cart for later. Even when the client is ready to clear their cart, it will be easy because all the products added to the cart will be readily available.
It is quite an advantage as every online buyer is looking to save time and energy by going through the same process twice. You could also introduce a wish list that allows your customers to share what they have saved on the cart with friends and family.
19. Offer Discount
Having saved the customers’ emails and sending them reminder emails on their carts could help remind them of products they needed but still needed to check out.
Accompany such emails with discounted prices on items already in the cart. This will excite the customers, and they will be ready to take advantage of those discounts.
20. Try and Estimate Possible Delivery Dates
According to the delivery option that a client is comfortable with, ensure that you have also indicated the day the product should be expected to arrive. Specifying the date when your item will arrive is relatively uncommon and helps customers develop some trust in the website.
Do you imagine what it’s like to purchase a product online and then wait? You have yet to determine when it will reach you because the website did not provide that information—disturbing, right?
21. Compress Your Checkout Page
Trying to get my online order done is an exercise I need to finalize within the shortest time possible. Finding out that I have to go through a few pages having to click “next” at the bottom of every page is not exactly how I want this process to be.
But if I find the whole process on a page, I will be more than pleased to shop from your website. By the end of the day, the goal is to checkout as fast as possible so ensure you capture all the necessities in a single page.
22. Provide Space for Genuine Reviews
First, before committing to purchase from a specific eCommerce store, one must check the reviews against each product they are looking for. Reviews from other customers help your product move faster and reduce the cart abandonment rate.
Make sure your page displays honest reviews from other users, and watch the magic reviews have on products moving.
23. Offer Surprise Gifts
Most online stores offer gifts that accompany a product. These gifts are mostly considered as an appreciation of the customers.
Offering a website that gives its users gift options might be the way to reduce the rate at which they abandon their carts halfway.
24. Place the Checkout Button Last
Placing the checkout button last gives the customer enough time to go through their orders and specifications and ensure that it is what they want before they click the checkout button.
Once customers have fully identified what they want, they check out and don’t have to go to another page or another browser to make that possible.
25. Use Bright Colors and Wide Buttons
Remember, this website is supposed to accommodate everyone all at once. Some have trouble with small numbers, while others have dull colors.
Your website should have bright colors with crucial information stages and wide buttons to prevent one from struggling to see what they are searching for.
26. Do a Follow-Up on Abandoned Carts
Seeing that your website saves information about all the customers that make attempts to purchase products from your page, follow up with these emails.
Send the reminder emails once. Such shows the customer that you care about their well-being, and they are more likely to clear their carts after this.
27. Use AutoFill for the Location
There are a few instances where a mistake might occur, and the address might be miswritten. In this instance, the products end up going to the wrong address.
For instance, websites that use google autofill have a higher chance of customers completing their orders than those that require you to input manually. By so doing, customer satisfaction is met, and they can easily order and receive their products without struggles.
28. Ensure the Order Summary Remains Intact on the Checkout Page
Make sure that every time the customer wants to review their checkout page, they find a summary of whatever products they are trying to purchase.
The process is handy for those who plan on clearing their cart after adding products. Accompany the products with their respective photos to remind your customer precisely what they had in mind while adding products to the cart.
29. Remind the Customer of how Much they are Saving
Seeing that money information is provided last, it is essential to remind customers how much they save by completing their purchase. It is also an excellent way to keep potential shoppers committed to their purchases.
The most common way of making this work is by showing the before and after prices. Instead, you could do a compilation at the end and let the customer know how much they will save if they complete their purchase.
30. Use Product Images to Reinforce the Checkout Journey
A way of reminding your customers of what they are buying throughout the whole checkout journey is to boost your chances of making a complete sale.
Photos motivate clients to complete their purchases as they cannot wait to own the product they want.
Conclusion
A company’s checkout page is one of the essential pages on your website. To quickly grow your business, you must ensure that the final page aligns with the above mentioned points. As discussed in the above article, it is only fair to agree that any mistakes made on the checkout page might affect your business negatively, whereas upholding these steps will improve your experiences with your clients.
Checkout abandonment if ignored could create a major issue in the e-commerce market in a few years to come. With every abandoned cart, is a lost client! If you as the developer don’t make an effort to get back your client, most definitely, another will. Thank you for reading!
