The average business loses more than 65 percent of its interested customers to shopping cart abandonment each year, according to the Baymard Institute. It doesn’t matter how much money your business generates annually – losing that many sales for any business is drastic. However, you can easily turn your online shopping cart into an effective conversion tool by closely following five simple steps.
Simplify the Checkout Process
If your checkout process is overly complicated, your customers’ patience will run out much quicker than you might think and they will search elsewhere for what they need. The best course of action to take, therefore, would be to streamline and simply the checkout process within your website as much as possible. Use as few checkout pages as possible to process transactions and payments and send your customers their confirmation emails. The quicker they are able to make it through the entire process, the more likely they will successfully do just that without leaving their shopping carts behind. A good way to ensure that your customers have the easiest possible checkout process, it is advisable to make use of a shopping cart template as they are designed keeping the intricate specifics of ecommerce in mind. As a matter of fact, a bulk of ecommerce websites makes use of such templates to ensure a smoother checkout; thereby generating more sales.
Make Your Return Policy Visible and Clear
Another important step is to make sure that your return policy remains visible and clear throughout the entire process, especially when the customer has reached the shopping cart. This is primarily because of the fact that customers are more confident with finalizing online purchases after they have had a chance to review the corresponding return policies and procedures. One study shows that more than 60 percent of customers view this policy before purchasing anything online. Therefore, not having a return policy at all or having one that is simply not visible to the average consumer can immediately cause you to lose quite a few potential sales.
Allow Customers to Checkout as Guests
It is understandable that you want to gather as many leads through your website as possible, which is why there are quite a few advantages to requiring interested customers to register for accounts before finalizing an order. However, this can also backfire in a way that causes your conversion rate to plummet. One study confirms that more than 14 percent of customers will abandon your website simply because of the fact that you don’t offer a guest checkout option. Keep in mind that eight out of the top ten retailers in the U.S. offer guest checkout options through their respective websites, according to eConsultancy.com, so there’s no reason why your website shouldn’t do the same.
Display Reviews and Testimonials from Past Customers
Your customers are only going to pay attention to what you say about your own products for so long before they completely tune you out. They understand that your opinions, descriptions and overall content is heavily biased and will search high and low for honest reviews and ratings that have been submitted by actual customers. To decrease the chances of abandonment, you should include quite a few reviews and testimonials that have been posted and published about your products within your actual website design – including on your shopping cart page. By doing so, your customers will be able to build confidence in your product and overall brand without having to leave the site to do so.
Make an Effort to Retrieve Missed Opportunities
Just because a customer might abandon their shopping cart doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to another competitor and want nothing to do with your company. There are many different reasons why customers abandon websites both intentionally as well as unintentionally, including dropped Internet signals, dead batteries in mobile devices, etc. You should take the time to reach out to these missed opportunities with an attempt to reel them back in as sales. This can be done in two different ways.
First, you can offer them free shipping on their next order which has been proven to win back an average of 77 percent of consumers. Second, if you were able to capture their email addresses before they abandoned the website, you can send a personalized and retargeted reminder about their pending orders, according to Inc.com. Even though you may not win them all back, you will still be able to generate more sales than if you simply allowed them to get away.