How would you feel if out of 100 people who visit your product checkout page, 69 leave without buying?
Awful.
Yet, that’s the average abandonment rate according to data compiled from 33 shopping cart abandonment studies.
If you’re selling a product, you definitely want to get more people to buy. To achieve that, you have to get fewer people to abandon their carts.
So how do you achieve that?
By the end of this post, you will learn the top 9 techniques you can implement right away on your eCommerce store to bring shopping cart abandonment rates down.
1. Assure customers of secure payment
Buying your product for $53 is understandable. But no one wants to lose $978 because they bought your product.
Online fraud is real. And it’s a worry when people are about to buy your product. If they feel your payment process is insecure, they’re going to run and you’ll lose many sales as a result.
As an eCommerce store owner, what can you do to give potential customers a sense of security with their payment details?
- Use an SSL certificate. This is important if you run a website today. But vital if people are to release their payment details. People won’t pay when they see “Not Secure” beside your domain name on the browser.
- Use security badges. These badges give buyers a level of assurance that you’ve been certified safe by some reputable online security firms.
You should also use badges that people already know and trust. For instance, a survey by the Baymard Institute found that consumers trusted Norton and McAfee badges more than others.
2. Be clear about all possible costs
Your customers don’t want to be caught by surprise. Especially if it means paying more money at the point of purchase. In a study by Statista, 24% of consumers abandoned their carts because of unexpected costs and 54% did so because of expensive shipping.
That’s why you should be transparent about any hidden costs that might be added to the price displayed on your product page. With this, customers are aware of the amount they’ll pay before they get to the checkout page.
One way to do this is to use a shipping costs calculator. It’ll help customers calculate their shipping costs as they go through the buying process.
To aid the buying process, you can make shipping free when a customer spends at least a particular amount in your store.
3. Use exit-intent popups
When users are about to leave your page, you can use exit-intent popups to bring them back. If you provide the right offer.
This may be your last chance to bring them back and the most popular offer here is usually a discount on the product.
To a buyer who’s leaving your page due to high costs, a discount can make them reconsider and buy your product.
In some cases, this discount could also represent a better offer than they’ve seen on your competitors’ websites. Look at this website offering a 10% discount with its exit-intent popup.
4. Activate live chat on your pages
There are many things that go through your customer’s mind when they’re about to buy your product. They may have questions about your product that are not answered on your product page.
Do you have a return policy? Is there a guarantee on your product? And for how long? These are important questions to your buyer and can affect their buying decision.
Of course, you may have all these answers and more on another page. But your buyer probably lacks the patience to search around. They may just go to a competitor’s website if they’re unable to answer these questions.
However, with live chat functionality, they can answer this question and get their answers in time to make their buying decision. There are many tools available such as Intercom, Acquire.io, FreshWorks, and so on.
Data from Forrester shows that 55% of US online adults are likely to abandon their online purchase if they fail to find a quick answer to their question. Furthermore, 77% say a company valuing their time is the most important element of good online customer service.
To make your live chat even faster, you can implement chatbots to answer potential buyers’ questions.
To encourage buyers to use the live chat option, you can give a prompt asking them if they have any questions.
With the use of proactive live chat, Intuit increased average order value by 43% on its checkout page. Added to that, it increased its conversion rate by 195% on its lead generation page and sales by 211% on its product comparison page.
5. Enable guest checkout
Creating an account prolongs the buying process and this can lead to customers opting for an eCommerce store that makes this easier.
What is more important to your business? Having an account or getting the sale? You should consider that 21% of consumers left when they felt the process took too long.
Of course, you could argue that an account helps you to make more sales. But if it stops you from making the current sale, there’s little chance of a future sale from that buyer.
Therefore, making that sale is important now. After making the sale, you can always ask the customer to open an account. They’ll be more receptive to do so at this time.
If you use the WooCommerce platform, you can enable guest checkout. Click on “Enable guest checkout” in your checkout settings to do this.
If you’re using Shopify, you can select “Accounts are optional” in your customer account settings to enable the option.
Another way to make the account easier after the sale is to enable them to open the account through Google or Facebook. This means they don’t have to fill in a long form before they register.
6. Make cart content visible
The reality today is that people shop around to find the best deal. It’s common to have people add some products to their cart to see how much these products will cost.
Then check different competitors just to find the best deal possible. If a buyer finally settles to buy from you but can’t find their cart, you could drive them away.
They should be able to find their cart and purchase the products right away. Look no further for an example than the king of eCommerce, Amazon. You can see the number of items in your cart.
This makes it easier for a purchase. Furthermore, it’s beneficial if a customer plans to make the purchase in the near future.
An eCommerce platform like WooCommerce gives you this option when you install the WooCommerce Menu Cart plugin.
It even goes a bit further by showing the price of the products in the cart.
7. Make your website’s navigation simple
Having potential buyers go through many pages before they can pay for a product can chase them off your website.
The rule of thumb is to ensure users don’t have to navigate for more than 3 pages before they can buy your product.
Likewise, the user experience should be simple enough for users to find the most important elements they need to complete their purchase.
From the Statista study, 16% of consumers abandoned their carts because the navigation was too complicated.
Look at this checkout page from Dribbble:
It also has a “remember me” option which allows customers to make payments in the future without having to enter their payment details.
8. Add convincing visuals to your product page
One of the main challenges with online shopping is that customers don’t get to check the product out physically. This can lead to situations where customers get a product that’s underwhelming compared to their expectations.
It’s therefore important that you provide the best visual representation of your products possible. You can do this in 2 major ways:
- Images. Add high-resolution images to give people a clear picture of the product they want to buy. You can also have images of people using your product to give your customer a sense of the benefit they’ll gain.
- Videos. In some cases, making a video to show details about a product or a mini review could do more than images. See this Zappos page for one of its shoes:
You can see images of different views of the shoe and a short video review.
Another means that could become popular in the near future is virtual reality (VR) to give customers a sense of what it means to use a product.
9. Employ social proof to encourage customers
People desire what other people desire. Sometimes, we don’t know why.
But it’s a psychological rule that has worked over the years and still continues to work. One of the best ways to market your product is to show potential buyers how others have used it in the past.
How many people have bought your product? Can you place testimonials on your page? How do people rate your product?
Check out this example by Zulily:
In a single page, the company has been able to use social proof with the number of people viewing and the number of items sold. It has also shown scarcity with the items now unavailable and the countdown.
Conclusion
Getting potential buyers to your checkout page is a lot of hard work. Therefore, losing them at this stage when they’re so close to making a purchase is an awful situation.
You can turn this awful situation into a great one when you implement these techniques to help customers have easier and better experiences during the checkout process.
Guest author: Sam Makad is an experienced writer and marketing consultant. His expertise lies on marketing and advertising. He helps small & medium enterprises to grow their business and overall ROI. Reach out to Sam Makad on Twitter or LinkedIn