By Laurence Cardin, Digital Marketing Coordinator
Your eCommerce store is online. Google Analytics tells you there is a growing number of visitors, yet your sales aren’t growing as fast as you expect. On the contrary, you are seeing an increasing number of abandoned carts. This is a situation we have seen in many customers, leading us to look for the main reasons why customers leave without making a purchase and the solutions to decrease the chances of this from happening.
Source: Statista
Customers who add items to their cart and decide to drop it right before paying do so primarily because of unexpected shipping costs. According to a study by Statista, 25% of consumers abandon their shopping cart when there are shipping costs they didn’t expect.
We recommend that you offer free shipping, even if you need to slightly increase the price of your products.
If free shipping is not possible, make sure the customer knows the shipping price beforehand during the process of their purchase. It is not enough to simply place it on the homepage. We recommend to at least give an approximation of the shipping price of each product. You could give access to a table showing the different possible rates if necessary.
According to the same study, the second reason for the abandonment of a cart would be the obligation to create a user account.
Offer the option to go through check out as a visitor. Once the customer has entered all their information and payment method, you can give them the option of saving this information for their next purchase. You will end up with the same result, but the customer will appreciate having the choice. As you will already have all their information, simplify the creating of an account by only asking them for a password to save everything.
It is normal to research products that you don’t necessarily wish to purchase at the time. That accounts for 17% of abandoned carts. Think about it, how often do you put a product in your shopping cart just to be capable of finding it later on? That’s why Amazon first created a wish list option.
Make sure the customer’s products stay in their shopping cart for their next visit. You can also add a wish list in which the customer can save products for later. To create a wish list, the customer must create a user account which can then give you access to their information.
A second effective method is an abandoned cart email. This means sending the customer an email with an offer on the abandoned items in their shopping cart on your site. To do this, however, you need to obtain their email address by either having them create an account or, through a pop-up that prompts them to subscribe to a newsletter.
Some people are reluctant to give their credit card information to a new business on the internet.
Show the customer that your site is secure by adding a small padlock in the URL area of the payment page and inscribing that the site is secure. This is sometimes all it takes to reassure the client.
We recommend offering the secure payment option through PayPal and accepting several different credit cards.
An overly long buying process that requires entering a lot of information that isn’t essential to the purchase can cause the customer to buy elsewhere or simply abandon their purchase.
Reduce your buying process to the bare minimum. We recommend that the menu and footer be removed from the payment page, eliminating distractions.
We have just explained 5 reasons why customers leave your site without purchasing the items in their cart. This list could have been much longer, since each client has their own reason to leave. You will never be able to completely eliminate shopping cart abandonments, but by working on the top 5 causes discussed above, you will certainly be able to recover some of them.
Adeo Marketing is a Quebec-based eCommerce agency that can help you lower your abandoned cart rate. Do the math! If only 5% of your abandoned carts were converted into sales, how much would that bring to your business?
