6 Steps To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment For Your E-Commerce Business

The reason why shopping cart abandonment stings so much is because these are the people who were one click away from buying the product. Your marketing did its work, your pricing strategy is decent, and even your website did its part. Still, for some reason, they walked away and left one step before the finish line.

Fortunately, people with products still in the shopping cart are a resource that you can easily tap into. Sometimes, they’re valuable lessons to be learned. At other times, all it takes is a single re-engagement for them to come back. With that in mind, here are the top seven steps to reduce your shopping cart abandonment in the future and make people who left at this stage come back.

Start Using CRM Software

Later, you can start analyzing some of the major reasons why your customers abandoned their shopping carts. Software review expert Aleksandar Stevanovic from Techopedia says that the most efficient CRM software can transform the job of handling consumer and prospect data. But apart from that, it also enhances the way of doing business. So, while everyone must be aware of some causes of high shopping cart abandonment, it might be better to consult your CRM tool and see if there are individual patterns of behavior that apply to some of your users.

In other words, does this user have a habit of “just looking,” and maybe they clicked on the “add to shopping cart” button by accident? If that’s the case, your standard methods of making them come back won’t work. They’re just not in the right stage of their customer lifecycle, and you have to spend more time on their conversion.

Still, for all of this to work, you have to start using CRM software, gathering customer data (in agreement with regulations and compliances), and processing it into insights.

Be Transparent About Costs

One of the biggest reasons why people abandon your site without buying anything is because of the hidden cost. The way this works is simple:

• They see the product they like
• They see that the price is fine
• When they reach the checkout stage (their cart), they see that the cost is higher.

Why is this the case? Well, first of all, a lot of businesses don’t add the cost of shipment or taxes right away. Why? Well, it makes the UI of the product page simpler and serves as a marketing trick. After all, a lower price might make the customer choose to buy it and when they see the actual price at the checkout, they might choose to just buy.

The problem is that this doesn’t just make them not buy, it erodes the trust between them and your brand, which is something you can’t allow to happen. So, be more transparent about costs, even if it makes you feel like you’re driving customers away.

1. Simplify The Checkout Process

People just want to buy the product and be done with it, so if your checkout process is too lengthy, they might leave for good. Others don’t feel comfortable leaving too much information to the brand that they’re not sure if they’ll collaborate with ever again. Either way, you need to simplify the process.

First, you need to enable guest checkouts. This means that your guests can just purchase without having to register. They can just give their payment information their email, and be done with it.

Keep in mind that you still want them to register, so while you want to incentivize registering, you shouldn’t require it.

You’ll get their email either way, which means that you still have the means to retarget them if you need to. You also need to acknowledge that just because they didn’t register this time, it doesn’t mean they won’t the next time around.

Most importantly, making your checkout simpler and quicker is never a bad idea.

2. Retarget Your Audience

Sometimes, all you have to do is ask. Simply asking them if there’s something they forgot in the shopping cart might do the trick. First, they might have forgotten (it’s not that they gave up). Second, if they did put it in the cart, at one point, there was general intent to make a purchase. Maybe when they’re faced with this choice again, they decide to go through with the purchase.

While there are so many other ways you can leverage digital tools to improve your online marketing, you must focus on retargeting customers. People who have already made purchases are qualified leads, and the same goes for people who have abandoned these shopping carts.

What both of these groups have in common is that they are already interested in your products. The first group proved that by buying from you, while the other group came a click away from following up with the purchase.

3. Try A/B testing

It could be that your entire checkout page can be improved, so you might want to try some A/B testing of different designs to see what works best.

While some ideas sound better on paper, it’s important to remember that the bulk of these things cannot be figured out intuitively. You need to see the numbers, and in the majority of fields, there’s a huge lack of case studies. Why? Well, because businesses that conduct these surveys use the numbers on their own. After all, they’ve spent time, resources, and hours performing data collection and analyzing said data, so why would they just share them with the competition?

So, you need to see these things for yourself.

It’s not just about the conversion rates; you’re also measuring other things like speed and cost-effectiveness. For instance, if you plan to introduce some site-wide changes, you might first want to try testing it on your own.

For the checkout stage, the size, shape, and color of the button can make the biggest difference. You can also focus on visual hierarchy.

4. Improve Your Customer Support

Another thing you need to consider is that maybe they have some questions that are preventing them from making a purchase. A lot of people do research before committing to a purchase, and if they fail to answer the question, they just give up and choose not to buy.

So, the way to fight this is by improving your customer support process. What you need to do is make sure that you’re available on more than one channel. They need to be able to send mail and a ticket, but you also want them to be able to reach you via live chat, perhaps even a phone line.

Other than this, you can do a lot by nurturing a healthy community and encouraging discourse. It’s also important that you get your FAQ page in order. This way, you’ll allow your audience to help themselves.

The use of chatbots for customer support purposes is also highly advised. It can improve the level of customer support, save everyone’s time, and reduce the amount of work hours needed by your human customer support representatives.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Is A Huge Untapped Potential For Your E-Commerce Business

A shopping cart abandonment is not nearly as bad as you would assume it to be. These people are still there; they’re still interested in the product. If not, they hold a clear answer to what happened, and you can fix the issue before it drives away other potential customers. You need, however, to focus on the solution and try to introduce some changes.

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