Did you know that about eight out of ten customers who add your products to their digital shopping cart won’t make it through to actually purchasing those items? According to a 2020 report from SaleCycle, 84.27% of people left their carts abandoned. That’s a scary number for online sellers who depend on sales to keep their businesses moving.
What Causes Shopping Cart Abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment doesn’t always happen because your prices are too high or someone decides that your product isn’t right for them. There are a lot of factors that can go into a shopper adding products or services to their cart but never checking out, including:
- A confusing or messy checkout process
- Not being able to confirm their order
- Limited payment options
- Not feeling confident in your return or refund policy
- Getting sidetracked and forgetting about their order
- A long delivery estimate
- The checkout isn’t optimized for mobile
These are all things that can interfere with a customer’s order once they get to the checkout process on your website — and they may be enough to turn that customer away forever.
Tips for Avoiding Digital Shopping Cart Abandonment
To get your customer back, there are probably some tweaks you need to make or strategies you need to implement in your online checkout. Consider the following tips to boost your sales by getting customers to follow through with their purchase.
1. Make Your Website as User-Friendly as Possible
The full process of learning more about a product, choosing to buy that product, and completing the purchase of the product should be smooth sailing for a customer. If not, you have a good chance of losing them before they even make a buying decision.
Walk through your buying process several times yourself, using different scenarios. Learn what it’s like to be a customer on your site. Add products to your cart, read through product descriptions, look for reviews, search for products, and complete the checkout from start to finish. Were there any steps that could be improved for the customer? If so, simplify them.
2. Offer Irresistible Discounts
Pricing can be a downfall of online sellers. Even if your prices are more than fair, buying them at full price isn’t appealing. Even a discount as little as 5% can make your customers more likely to want to finish their purchase with you. To put it simply, a discount can make your customers feel appreciated, boosting your trust and likeability factor immediately.
Offer discounts on your main page or on product pages. You can also add a popup to the checkout process that gives a customer a limited-time discount. Example: Save 20% on your order if you complete your purchase within the next 10 minutes!
3. Make Shipping Free
In a 2018 Walker-Sands report, 79% of consumers stated that they’d be more likely to shop online if the store offered free shipping. That statistic proves how important consuming the cost of shipping as a business is when it comes to making sales. It’s possible that customers are reaching the checkout process happy with their order, only to be turned away when they see a shipping cost of $5.99 for a couple of items.
If you can’t afford to offer free shipping because you sell low-priced products, consider setting an order minimum for free shipping. This technique has an added bonus of encouraging customers to order more to reach the free shipping minimum.
4. Show Customers What They’re Buying
You spend ample time crafting compelling product descriptions that make your visitors want to buy, but once they reach the checkout, a shopping cart with just product titles and no pictures can be off-putting to customers. Mistakes happen, and it’s easy to sometimes click the wrong product when ordering and not realizing the flub. It’s best to show your customers what they’re buying to make sure they have what they intended.
To do this, add clear thumbnails next to each item during the checkout process. It’s a simple way to add a layer of assurance to their order.
5. Implement a Live Chat Feature
Live chat software has so many uses and benefits, but one perk you may not have thought of is its ability to keep customers on your site. When someone is about to navigate away from their shopping cart or remains idle in the checkout process, your live chat feature can work to answer questions or address concerns that might be holding them back. You’ll be in front of your customers 24/7, whenever they need your help with ordering.
6. Entice Them to Come Back
Even with all these tactics in place, you’ll still lose customers during checkout. It’s the nature of the beast. But you also still have the chance to win them over.
To do it, send an email several hours after the customer leaves their cart behind. In the email, include a discount for returning and placing the order. Many email marketing services offer this feature for tracking shopping cart abandonment and follow up.
7. Make Returns and Tracking Easy
It’s not uncommon for a customer to add what they want to their cart before looking up your tracking and return policies. And these policies could be what prevent them from ultimately buying.
Customers should find it painless to track their order and return an item, if necessary. Have clear policies in place on your site, explaining each process in your FAQ or customer support section. The better you do in this area, the easier it’ll be for new customers to trust your business.
Implementing shopping cart abandonment popups is one of the best strategies to get more customers to complete the checkout process, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming to create effective popups. That’s why we’ve partnered with POWR to make their Popup Builder available to publishers directly from our platform. With easy-to-use, customizable templates, you can make powerful website popups that reduce cart abandonment and boost sales in minutes.
