How To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

It can be very frustrating to picture a consumer visiting your website, loading their online shopping cart with goods, only to lose the sale at the last minute. When up to 3/4s of customers regularly abandon a full shopping cart, it’s clear that your business needs to concentrate on retaining and converting as many of those site visitors to completed sales as possible. There are a number of techniques that you can use that will reduce the likelihood of consistent shopping cart abandonment, and these tips will ensure that you are doing everything you can to boost your conversion rates and give your business a stronger foundation.

Reduce surprise elements

It’s a simple fact that consumers reject the concept of surprises, and that’s especially true when it comes to the price of the goods that they’re ordering. That’s why you need to ensure that from the very first click, your site visitors will have a firm idea of the total costs throughout the shopping experience. Any additional costs because of delivery and tax rates can be major causes of shopping cart abandonment, so you need to be as transparent as possible.

Depending on your website platform, there are a number of ways to tackle this, but the most useful is by having a calculator add-on, which will provide customers with all of the necessary charges before they get to the cart itself.

The visible Cart

People use their shopping carts for a number of reasons, and one of the most common is simply to keep track of potential purchases. Once products are in the cart, it’s much easier to scroll through and compare prices, quality, and delivery times. Ideally, you want some presence of the cart itself to be visible on every page of your website. Consider the way that large businesses like Amazon display their own cart: in a prominent position, easily identifiable and with a running total of goods quantity displayed at all times.

If you’re using Shopify as your e-commerce platform, then some add-ons can achieve this, and you might also consider taking advantage of trusted Shopify developers who can ensure that your add-on integrations are seamless and span across the entirety of your site.

The importance of guest checkout

As a consumer yourself, you probably already recognize that the majority of people don’t want to spend time creating an account with a business when all you want to do is buy. This can become a significant cause of cart abandonment, which is why it’s essential that you allow for guest checkouts.

In highly competitive markets, it’s vital that you give site visitors the least amount of cause to leave your site and try again with your competitors. The best idea when it comes to guest checkouts is to get the buying element of the transaction out of the way, and then prompt for registration or a subscription to your newsletter.

Up to an incredible 84% of people shopping online are comparing prices across a range of related sites. By following these initial tips, your conversion rates will have a much better chance of growth, and you’re far less likely to lose a full shopping cart to your competitors.