Regardless of how attractive and well-designed your website is, it may seem like […]
Abandoned shopping carts are a common problem for most every online store out there. You may have excellent copy, offer high quality products and yet still struggle with low conversion rates. The main reason for facing such problems is simply not capturing and maintaining your visitors attention.
Research shows that more than a half of online store visitors abandon shopping carts before completing the checkout process. Each abandoned shopping cart is an obstacle towards increasing sales and a cause of lost revenue. So really, rates of shopping cart abandonment have to be reduced if you want to run a solid online business.
If you want to boost conversions you should consider making some adjustments to your website. Have in mind that the crucial thing here is to keep the shopper focused and attentive throughout the checkout process. Online shoppers are not willing to spend a lot of time doing the actual purchasing and they may easily getdistracted. Additionally most online shoppers have developed a sophisticated taste for aesthetics, and find outdated designs less trustworthy.
One of the main reasons for high abandoned shopping cart rates is that online shoppers tend to be impatient. If your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, visitors will most likely give up and try another website. Since you have this short time to capture your visitor s attention, do not waste it on loading unnecessarily large graphics.
Loading speed will also add to improving SEO since search engines tend to take it into consideration when ranking websites. Therefore, you should take all available measures to make your website load faster and enjoy an increase in conversion rates.
Test your website and see what can be done to improve its speed. Try to optimize all images and all audio and video content. Reduce any scripts and the number of plugins. You can also reduce server response times and avoid abandoned shopping cart issues.
Online shopping lacks a way for the customer to touch and feel the product. The only idea of product quality that the shopper gets is through the images and descriptions. People are easily attracted by visual appearances, so try to keep the descriptions short and focus on the product images.
Use relevant, high quality images of the products. This will add to the perceived professionalism and credibility that is necessary in an online business. Use multiple product images, preferably one for each model and color that you offer. It’s also good if you can provide images of people using or wearing your product.
In order to prevent shoppers going back and rechecking their orders It’s crucial to keep thumbnails of all the purchased products. It’s best if the thumbnails turn to larger pictures on a mouseover.
The most valuable element on an ecommerce website is the CTA (Call to Action), so you should make sure that your visitors can easily spot it. Put a nicely designed CTA button in a blank space so it won t get suffocated by other content. Make sure the color of the CTA button contrasts the background to the extent that it is clearly visible at a first glance.
Ensuring that visitors will see and click the CTA button is the first step to grabbing a visitor's attention. If you want to avoid an abandoned shopping cart, you will have to maintain their attention throughout the entire checkout process.
Any image, banner, ad, or other content on the sidebar may cause distractions and take the visitors away from your sales page. Avoid navigation bars and unessential links and text. Keep your visitors entirely focused on the buying process if you want more conversions.
Although online shopping is rapidly growing, many people still have trouble trusting virtual stores. A lot of people are still wary about handing out their credit card information online. Lack of trust in your website increases abandoned shopping cart rates. Make sure to clearly state your security and privacy policies in a prominent position so that your visitors see them at the moments that doubt creeps in.
Another way of to reassure online shoppers about safety is to provide detailed contact information. Provide the full company name, a physical location, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and even a free hotline. It’s great if you can add a live chat button so that your customers can contact you during the buying process.
If you want to irritate your customers, just let them find out that one of the products in the cart is out of stock, and do it in the middle of the checkout process. Giving information about additional fees during checkout is another great way to create angry customers and cause abandoned shopping carts.
Be transparent about stock availability. If the stock is running low, state how much is left. If a product is out of stock, try to provide an estimate of when they can expect the product to be available again. Be clear about any shipping fees and taxes at the start of the buying process, too.
One of the most essential rules in ecommerce is to make the buying process quick and easy. Many people report that they have abandoned a shopping cart because the checkout process was too complicated. So, try to simplify and shorten the checkout process as much as you can, preferably have it all done in a single page
Of course, you need to include all the essential information, but try to fit everything in within three steps. It’s crucial to include a progress bar so people will know how many steps are left, and what is the next buying step. You should also provide the opportunity for people to go back to the previous step so they can re-check the information that they entered.
Make it easy for customers to remove single items, change quantities or color options in the cart, all without having to leave the cart. You should also make the purchasing process easy for customers by offering multiple payment methods.
People trust other people s feedback and reviews. You should try to provide your potential customers with information about the shopping experience. This can come from previous or current customers. You should also add buttons that help with the social proof, such as a facebook likes button, pinterest pins button or a tweet button. Every little helps, and this social proof might help hesitating visitors turn into customers.
Make it easy for customers to find and leave feedback. Don t be afraid of potential complaints or a negative review they can only help you improve the shopping experience for all future customers. Therefore, It’s essential to act on the feedback that you receive and use it to boost conversion rates.
If this is possible on your system, consider contacting any quitters. Some of the abandoned carts will come from people who are registered on your site, so you have their email address. In other cases they may be new to the site, but have filled out the contact info before abandoning. Consider contacting some of the "quitters" to find out what made them abandon a purchase. Again, this is if your system allows you to do this.
