Why the customers switch ecommerce websites during the process of checkout? Why online stores face high shopping cart abandonment rate? There are several reasons behind that incomplete deal with any online shop. It can be the hidden costs involved, comparison-shopping, poor functionality, unreliability, and lacking one step checkout. It’s true that improving functionality could help reducing the site abandonment rate, but still there are many other factors behind increasing that over the time.
What Harm Does The Abandonment Cause?
It’s not possible for online retailers to have zero abandonment rate. Higher the rate is lower would be the sales and hence big loss in online business. The solution to reduce the abandonment is to know how it is distributed on the website. Few points are mentioned here to help ecommerce business owners minimize the rate of lost-sales. Read for your knowledge
1. Hidden Costs: Remove Them
The customers should be provided with an honest cost of whatever product they want to purchase. If there were any hidden strings involved during the checkout process, the abandonment rate would climb up. It’s a greater shock if a customer comes to know about the hidden cost towards the end of the deal. Mention clearly the total cost along with the product so that customers feel you being honest in your business. For example, see below the cart page:
Another point is tell the customer if the product is available in the stock or not and could be delivered within time. If a customer gets the information at the end stage that the product is short and he/she could get a late delivery, expect the abandonment rate getting higher.
2. Window Shopping: Discourage That
It’s not the brick and mortar world where people wander from one to the other market to shop the products of their choice. However, you can expect such kind of behavior at your online shop as well. So, don’t give the customers a reason to switch to some other website. If the customers were provided with rich content about the product along with the images, it would be a big appeal for them to make a final deal. Provide the customers with shopping guides to help their online shopping venture. You can also inform them about the latest model of the product they are going to purchase or have already purchased; it will also help in grabbing their attention.
To make the shopping like that of real world, provide help of a real time assistant. Offer a call back button or live chat facility to help the customers in solving any problem they are facing while making a deal online.
Follow the purchase and send an email of acknowledgement to the happy customer. It will make them feel good about your ecommerce shop and they will come again and again to shop more.
3. Checkout Process: Don’t Make That Complex
Nothing else could frustrate the customers of an ecommerce shop than a complicated checkout process. If the complication is removed, which is possible by using one step checkout, the abandonment rate could be lowered.
If a customer has filled the form and entered the billing details, and some error occurs, expect the abandonment if he/she is asked to re-enter all the details. Instead, use cache to save the information entered in the form, and ask for filling the fields having error only.
The checkout process should not be expanded over the pages; instead, should be kept simplest to appeal to the customers.
Another approach is to use a login process or use cookies for the purpose of recognizing the user’s computer. All it will help in demanding less information from the customer due to the history already accessed.
Process flow diagram is also being used these days at ecommerce websites to let the customers know where they are in the checkout process. However, if the process were long, this flow diagram would help increasing the abandonment rate.
See the given-below example of complicated checkout that can cause cart abandonment.
Here is how you can optimize your checkout page to drop the cart abandonment rate.
You can see that customers can add all the information at once in this straight forward and short checkout form. There is no confusion and complication involved. Customers know that by clicking on ‘Place Order’ button, their order is placed and nothing more is required.
4. Customer Trust: Win That
The most important factor to reduce the shopping cart abandonment is to win over the customer trust. To respect the customer privacy means building trust for them. For example, if your e-shop stores cookies of the customers, let them know how these cookies work. The encryption standards also matter while considering the customer privacy. Customers like to see the recognizable brands; do display the logo of the brand being used. Also, inform the buyers how do their credit card details are transferred to the servers of the website and how is the process kept safer.
5. Website Reliability: Improve For High Sales
It has been observed that the shopping cart abandonment rates are higher for the ecommerce websites that are unreliable. Websites taking long time to load onto the screens can’t win over the customers’ confidence. Customers feel their private billing details compromised if the load time is higher for any ecommerce shop. They also perceive that they may have to pay double in case of any error during the checkout process.
Better to optimize the web pages for quick downloading. Minimize the use of complex graphics and make the file sizes smaller by re-sampling the graphics, to keep the load time shorter for the customers. Another issue can be that of server side bandwidth, which could be tackled to improve the load time. It will also help in improving the reliability of the website. Installing load balancers and revising the redundancy measures could help in improving the website reliability.
These are just few ways to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate of an ecommerce store. The real goal is to provide the customers with enhanced shopping experience, which could be achieved by correcting the issues mentioned above. Focus the usability and functionality of your ecommerce store and remove any hurdles that could hamper the smooth shopping experience of the site users. You will see your customers passing through the checkout process successfully.
Share your views about this post or add your own comments below.
- Bio
- Google+
- Latest Posts
