Cart Abandonment: Your Online Checkout Rate

Of all the problems that affect ecommerce stores, cart abandonment has got to be up there with the most frustrating. After all your work and effort to get people to choose products in your store, they get all the way to the checkout … and then leave without making the purchase.

Infuriating though it is, there are a number of things that you can do to help prevent it happening too much.

Add Trust Symbols

One of the big problems with buying online concerns trust – or the lack of it. With stories in the press every week about big data leaks and credit card details being stolen, can you really blame customers for being cautious about handing over their personal information?

If this is increasing cart abandonment levels, add some trust symbols to your site. These include security symbols that clearly demonstrate you take your security seriously, such as the Norton Secured logo, symbols of organisations that you belong to, and awards that you have won, especially for your security and customer service.

Place these near to the products and make them clear when people make purchases. This will help them to get over the doubt they may be feeling about submitting their payment details.

Simplify the Checkout Process

There is nothing that sends potential customers running quite like a complicated checkout, so make it easy on them. Don’t ask them for lots of information other than their name and email, and make the process as quick and smooth as you possibly can.

Once people know they want to buy something, don’t hold them back. Do everything you can to make their purchase easy, and this often comes down to good e-commerce web design.

Help Customers to Pay

As well as simplifying the checkout process, you should also make it as easy as possible for customers to pay. This means ensuring they have the option of various payment methods.

Credit card and debit cards from all the main providers should be considered essential. But also include options like PayPal and other payment gateways. Not everyone wants to pay with a credit card, so don’t lose a sale because of it.

Show a Progress Bar

It’s always good practice to show a progress bar for the different stages of the checkout. This is especially useful if you have a long checkout process. This allows customers to clearly see that there are a certain amount of stages so that they don’t get to the second-to-last stage and decide that it is taking too long.

Make the Experience Slicker

Don’t let minor problems get in the way of a sale. If your site pages take ages to load, this is going to have an effect on your sales. People don’t want to wait around to buy their products, so sort out any problems with the design of your site and ensure your customers can go from choosing a product to purchasing it without waiting around for pages to load.

Reach Out to Lost Customers

When people do abandon their carts, this doesn’t mean that they will never come back. But don’t just sit back and do nothing. Instead, make an active effort to encourage them to return and complete their purchase.

You can do this through:

• Sending a follow-up email or two to encourage them to return.
• Using retargeting to remind them about the product they failed to purchase.
• Providing them with an incentive, either in the emails or ads, to give them even more reason to return to your store.

Reduce Cart Abandonment Levels

While you can never eliminate cart abandonment in your e-store, you can take some simple steps to reduce it. Incorporate some or all of the above strategies into your e-store, and you should start to see cart abandonment levels falling.

And remember, just because someone abandons their cart, that does not mean you have lost a customer – as long as you follow up with them properly.