By Jim Clanin
As an online retailer, you already know your customers are abandoning their shopping carts at an alarming rate. You’ve seen the statistics and you are losing money. Read this post: How to Give Your Shoppers an Experience that Replaces Touching a Product
Baymard Institute reports that the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.53%. Just think. For every 100 people shopping on your retail website, more than 68 of them leave without making their purchase. If you can understand specifically why your customers are leaving before checking out, you have the potential to increase sales by more than half of your current income!
According to Statista, the top reasons online shoppers abandon their carts include unexpected shipping costs, comparison shopping, not being ready to make the purchase, not enough payment options, and distractions. Take a look at the graph below:
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Now that we understand why shoppers are abandoning their carts let’s discuss what you can do to lower the percentage for your company.
Unexpected Shipping Costs
Shipping costs tend to be a very important factor for shoppers. A lot of shoppers love the convenience of shopping from home, but they want it to be affordable too. And it’s especially important that they know what the shipping costs are upfront. Be sure to be clear about the shipping costs from the get-go, and offer multiple options for shipping so there are a variety of price points to choose from. Another great option is to offer free or reduced shipping if their total order amount exceeds a certain dollar amount.
Comparison Shopping
The Internet is a great way to shop prices from the convenient of your own home, and people love shopping online for that very reason. Some ways you can claim these shoppers as your own is to offer price matching with competitors, free or reduced shipping if their order exceeds a certain amount, or by creating brand/store loyalty with a rewards program. These are great ways to get shoppers to stick around and possibly be a customer for the long term.
Not Ready to Purchase
Sometimes people are interested in an item, but they are not committed to making their purchase just yet. There could be many reasons for this, and not a whole lot you can do about it because we don’t know the specifics well enough. However, if you follow the advice given in the rest of this blog post, you should be making some good progress.
Order Value Not Large Enough for Free Shipping
As mentioned earlier, offering free shipping for a certain size order is a great strategy, however sometimes you may lose a shopper if they can’t get their order size large enough to receive free shipping. Some ways to avoid this issue is to provide product suggestions that may help them get over the threshold, offer free or reduced shipping if they can pick up at their local store, or even offering a rewards program where members receive free or reduced shipping.
Payment Options
It’s important to offer payment by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, and more if possible. The more payment options you make available, the less likely you will be to exclude a customer. This alone could increase your sales tremendously if your options are currently more restricted.
Distractions
We live in a world of distractions, and if your shoppers are distracted by something at home, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. However, one thing you can do is make your checkout process distraction free. The checkout process should be easy to follow, and with limited distractions including ads, images, etc. For more tips on creating a good checkout design, read our blog titled “Ecommerce Success Hinges on Good Design During Checkout.”
Understanding your customers’ reasons for abandoning their shopping carts is the first step to making changes to increase sales. Hopefully, these tips have given you some ideas on how to decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate, and more importantly lock in more shoppers. If you need more help with your e-commerce website, be sure to give us a call at 888-799-6067!
