Learning Lessons from Abandoned Shopping Carts

13th Feb 2014 | Posted by Eko S. | No Comments

It’s a fact of e-commerce: most shopping carts are abandoned by customers. Although there are many reasons for this, it’s important to try and get to know your customers, to figure out why they may be abandoning their shopping carts prior to checking out. Many times finding out the answer can be as simple as offering a survey to random customers who are leaving the site with items in their cart. While some shopping cart abandonment is unavoidable as many customers are simply browsing or price checking; there are ways to minimize shopping cart abandonment.

#Accept Several Forms of Payment

By accepting most, if not all, forms of payment with a powerful web shopping your business can stand out from any competition that allows only a limited number of payments. If you consider the scenario from the mind of the customer, the gravity of the situation becomes all the more clear. The customer has their shopping cart full of what they want and they’re ready to check out but they can’t. Your business is actually putting a potentially impenetrable wall between you and your customer by not accepting payments. Some customers will (but shouldn’t) tolerate high shipping rates, inconvenient site navigation, or other problems that can be circumvented or ignored. But at this point you’re telling a customer that their money is no good at your store.

#Make Registration Optional

You’re going to have to face it, not everyone wants to register for your site. Some customers may want to register only after a few purchases and some customers may only be purchasing a gift and are not planning on visiting your site frequently, if ever again. These people don’t necessarily want to register and don’t want to be forced to register. In fact, it may be good to go so far as to say that forcing your customer to do anything is a bad idea.

For those customers that do want to register make sure that they can via their social network. It’s quicker and easier for them, potentially provides you with more data, and may remind the customer to find you on their favorite social media site.

#Show Everything Up Front

It’s important to let the customers know that you’re trustworthy and not hiding anything from them and this should be an essential element of your web service cart shopping feature. If they feel that you’ve been hiding shipping costs, product info, or reviews they may not want to continue doing business with you as it creates a sense of unease, dishonesty, and an ‘us vs. them’ mentality that your business can’t afford to have. Although some people may leave if they feel your shipping is costly or slow, it likely won’t create the sense of ill will that the perception of hiding information will. And changing shipping options is significantly easier than changing a customer’s feeling that they’ve been deceived.

#Make Everything Quick

With Web 2.0, making navigating sites significantly easier, auto-fill options and other modern technological conveniences, there is no excuse for overcomplicating your checkout process. Along with not forcing your customer to register, make sure that it’s easy to come back to shopping if a customer abandoned their cart to comparison shop. The best ways to do this is by either having your site remember what was in their cart for when they return or allowing the customer to e-mail their progress.

Making checkout quicker also goes hand-in-hand with allowing them to register and login via their social media site. Logging in and browsing their wish list with one click is one of the easiest ways to make your site quicker.

In addition, you may want to consider allowing your customer to quickly switch and preview options and quantities, even from their shopping cart. This will allow the customer the freedom to choose the options that they would like, but also to change their mind if they would like to.

Conclusion

Every abandoned shopping cart is potential lost business, so make sure you’re keeping track of when and where your shopping carts were abandoned. However, as always, the best way to know why a cart was abandoned is to simply ask the customer.