Is Your Cart Abandonment Rate Too High?

According to BizRate, 75% of online shoppers have exited a website at least once during the past three months after adding items to the shopping cart, but without completing a purchase. This statistic is known as shopping cart abandonment.

At first glance, it may seem like there’s not much an e-commerce retailer can do to improve their cart abandonment rate. After all, how can you control whether the shopper’s dog needed to go out just then, or his daughter who is in the Army called right before he hit the checkout button?

Tips for Improving Your Cart Abandonment Rate

In reality, however, most customers who abandon online shopping carts do so because they became frustrated with the site in some way. They could not find the information they were looking for, or the checkout process was too cumbersome.

Reduce Frustration Factors

If you’ve ever shopped on a website that consistently sent you back to the home page after adding an item to your cart, requiring you to wade back through pages of merchandise before finding the page you were looking for, then you know how easily frustration can cause you to give up.

Make it your goal to reduce frustrating elements of your site such as making it difficult to find what they want, requiring them to jump through hoops in order to edit the shopping cart, or making it impossible to remove an item from the cart without emptying it entirely.

Improve Website Usability

Cater to your customers by making information easily available and navigation simple and straightforward.

Make sure items displayed on your website are in stock or that they are clearly marked as being out of stock before the customer begins to check out.

Display shipping and other fees at the beginning of the checkout process so a customer isn’t caught off guard.

Give first time customers an option to check out as a guest without registering, keeping in mind that a happy, unregistered customer will be more likely to shop with you again than will a frustrated, registered customer.

Simplify the Checkout Process

Once customers have found all the items they want to buy, they want to hand over their payment information as quickly as possible while still being reassured that their information is secure.

Keep the checkout process simple, require as few steps as possible, and give the customer several options including both payment by credit card and by PayPal or Google Checkout.

Display security symbols at checkout so customers know that you value their privacy and that their information will be protected.

As you seek to improve your shopping cart abandonment rate, keep the customer in mind at all times. Determine what will make the checkout and payment process as quick, easy, and painless as possible.

If you keep your customers happy, they’ll not only complete that purchase, but they’ll also return to you again and again.