As an online business owner you probably spend the bulk of your marketing efforts driving customers to your site.
But you know that just getting people to look around is not enough; you need to close the deal. The problem is a lot of these potential sales are cut short at the shopping cart phase.
Here are seven facts you need to know about shopping cart abandonment to improve conversions and grow your business.
Unexpected shipping costs can stop sales short.
Shipping fees that aren’t disclosed until the shopping cart stage can cause customer disappointment and lead to an abandoned cart.
You can avoid this by offering a flat rate or even free shipping. Have this feature clearly marked on web pages before the customer gets to the shopping cart phase to facilitate a seamless transaction.
A complicated checkout process loses customers.
People buy online because it’s quick and easy.
They’re likely to abandon their cart if the process becomes cumbersome with lengthy checkout forms and extraneous material.
Keep your checkout page simple. Ask only absolutely necessary information from customers and avoid superfluous ads and text that clutter the page.
Live chat can help conversions.
When a customer can chat with a service rep live, it helps bolster their confidence that your site is legitimate and that you care about their satisfaction.
Reps are especially useful for first-time buyers. They can answer questions about products, offer discounts, and help close the sale.
You can even set up your site so that if a customer lingers on a page for a period of time, a chat box will pop up.
People trust a company with clear contact information.
It may seem obvious, but having the company’s physical address clearly displayed on the site, along with a toll-free number, is important to customers who might be wary of online scams.
Disclosing this information prominently goes a long way toward building trust among consumers.
The shopping cart should always be visible throughout the buying process.
A dropdown feature that keeps the cart accessible in the top right corner makes it easy for customers to see what they’ve already added to the cart and to continue to add more items.
People buy what they can see.
Customers want to be assured they’re choosing the right product, and the best way to do that is to replicate the brick-and-mortar buying experience as much as possible.
Being able to look at a garment in different colors or to zoom in on supplement ingredients builds confidence in the buying decision.
It’s also a good idea to provide thumbnail images in the shopping cart, especially for customers buying multiple items.
Editing the cart should be easy.
If someone has a full shopping cart and decides they want to remove an item, it should be a straightforward process unless you want to lose the entire sale.
A simple link to remove the item allows the customer to continue the buying process and maybe add an additional item.
Seven out of ten online shopping customers put items in a cart and then abandon it and leave the site. There are many reasons this happens, from technological gaffes to unexpected costs to second thoughts.
Some of it can’t be helped, but it’s a lot of lost revenue, so you should try to find out why this might be happening and if there’s anything you can do about it.
A thorough analysis of your site and any potential problems combined with a shopping cart abandonment tool can help bring back a large percentage of those lost sales.
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