10 Ways to Eliminate Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is a real problem for anyone who runs an online store. On average, over 69% of online shoppers abandon their carts before completing their purchase.

There are several reasons why this happens and we are going to go over the top ten things you can do to avoid this from happening and increase the success rate of your online sales.

1 Provide Free Shipping

High shipping and handling costs are the main reasons that most potential customers abandon their carts. It may only be a couple of pounds but offering free or discounted postage and packaging charges will have a positive impact on your sales.

2 No Hidden Extras

Be upfront with any charges, particularly if you are not offering free shipping, as almost a quarter of online shoppers abandon their carts just because the seller did not display the shipping cost at the beginning of the sale.

3 Enable a Guest Checkout

Requiring customers to sign up and create an account before they order will slow down the whole process and lose you many customers who do not wish to set up an account to make a one-off purchase. There is always the option to create an account after they have already placed their order.

4 FAQs and Live Chat Support

Have information on hand for shoppers who have questions about their orders. Visible contact details such as a customer service phone number, or Live Chat if you have the means to provide it, are ideal to reassure shoppers that you are there to help should a problem arise.

5 Provide a Secure Checkout

In this day and age, many people are afraid of online fraud, especially when purchasing from websites they haven’t used before. Americans turn to VPNs powered by top VPN providers to prevent online fraud and hacking. For your part, use a secure payment gateway such as Paypal or include security badges to give your customers the peace of mind they need to use their credit card details on the Internet.

6 Offer Express Shipping Options

Some people may require their item within a couple of days and after that, it may be useless to them once an event has passed. Offering express shipping will give you the edge over competitors with standard delivery times and at the same time meet the needs of your customer who may have abandoned the cart had the shipping times been ambiguous.

7 Allow Carts to be Saved

It is really important to keep items saved in the shopping cart so that your customer can pick up where they left off, should they need to continue shopping at a later date. Imagine a customer who took the time to choose several items from your online store and had to go back to their order later on only to find an empty cart and have to start from scratch. Saving the cart is also great as people are doing more and more comparison shopping these days and some discerning shoppers may take a couple of days or so to actually decide to go ahead with a purchase.

8 Utilize Scarcity

Motivate your customers to complete their order by creating the need for them to ‘buy it now'. Let your visitors know how many units of your product are left in stock and/or how many have sold in the last twenty-four hours. A countdown clock is also a great idea for limited-time special offers as your customers will then spend less time comparing prices elsewhere.

9 Simplify the Process

Shopping online should be an easy and pleasurable task, so reduce any unnecessary pages and streamline the whole checkout process. The less number of pages the customer has to go through, the better. A progress indicator helps eliminate ambiguity and assures customers that the process is almost complete. Giving the option to remember payment info also helps speed up any future orders.

10 Use Exit Intent Pop-ups

Maximise your conversions with exit intent pop-ups which can be installed anywhere on your website, and detect when a visitor is about to leave. A message in a pop-up window will appear where you can entice them to stay and complete their purchase by offering a discount or a deal.

We hope this post has given you some inspiration for eliminating shopping cart abandonment in your eCommerce store.