Access Premium Content for Free
Subscribe to our newsletter and get free access to premium content. Discover valuable insights and exclusive resources available only to our subscribers.
How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment?
When you use analytical tools (Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, or a similar program) to track visitor statistics, you will undoubtedly notice many exits from the shopping cart page. By analyzing the pages visited, you can quickly identify where the purchase process stops, or at which step or page you lose the most customers. Once you find the cause of the issue, analyze individual elements and improve them.
Some of the most common factors for shopping cart abandonment include complicated ordering steps, shipping costs, issues with the functionality or display of input fields, and other purchase restrictions.
To achieve the most optimal purchases, pay attention to the following points:
- Minimize the number of steps in the purchase process,
- Remove distracting and unnecessary elements,
- Build trust in your online store and the purchase process,
- Offer various payment and delivery methods, and
- Implement cart abandonment email notifications.
Number of Steps in the Purchase Process
The more steps there are from the moment a visitor adds an item to the cart and becomes a customer to the thank-you page, the less likely a successful purchase will be. Too many steps can discourage visitors who are in a hurry, as too many steps can delay their purchase or confuse them on how to complete it successfully. Therefore, ensure a minimal number of steps. Personally, I always place the checkout on a single page on online stores and provide an option for guest checkout. This means you offer fields for non-registered purchase, and for customers who wish to create a user account, you provide that option as well. In some cases, when you want to capture the customer's email address, an additional step for entering the email address may be required before viewing the cart.
Remove Unnecessary Elements
With the shopping cart, you often differentiate between mandatory and optional data for completing a purchase. Mandatory steps are necessary for order processing and shipping items to the customer's address. Optional steps are mainly for collecting various information that can serve you for customer analysis or for various marketing purposes. In certain cases, these can also be elements that are necessary for some customers but not for others. You can adapt these so that specific fields are visible to one visitor and hidden to another. As an example, we can highlight the entry of regions, which is not mandatory in Slovenia but is essential for successful delivery in neighboring Austria and Italy.
The shopping cart also allows the use of coupons, which triggers thoughts in customers that they could save more during their purchase. You can easily solve this by adding a question like "How to get a discount coupon?" next to the coupon input button. In a pop-up window, customers will find the answer, and they won't leave the shopping cart to search for discounts online.
Credibility of the Online Store and Purchase
Often, there is an issue because merchants believe that visitors are experienced internet users and know when a purchase link is secure. Unfortunately, the credibility of the online store can become a significant problem. If visitors don't trust the site, they won't make a purchase on it. In my past experiences with online stores, I've had cases where visitors, due to uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the website, called the company's headquarters phone number to verify if the company truly exists and operates.
You can enhance credibility by presenting purchase security to customers, specifying warranty periods for ordered items, and clearly providing basic company information where customers will be ordering items.
One of the key factors in credibility and trust in online shopping is a secure connection.
Offer Various Payment and Delivery Methods
The payment method and delivery costs are two crucial elements that you should consider during the planning of your online store, as certain payment and delivery methods can incur additional costs for the company, especially for your customers. This is especially important for delivery costs, which can deter customers from making a purchase, particularly for lower-priced items. The best way to set appropriate delivery costs is to check the delivery costs of your competitors. Then, set your own costs and test them in various variations. This way, you'll gain direct insights into how delivery costs affect purchases and which ones yield the best results. However, keep in mind that delivery costs vary by country.
Payment methods can also vary by country. If you compare Slovenia and Austria, you'll find that entirely different payment methods are popular in the neighboring country compared to ours. Slovenia, in terms of payment methods, represents an extreme case, as the most common payment method here is cash on delivery, accounting for approximately 70% of all payment methods, while it's negligible in neighboring Austria. Therefore, ensure that you offer payment methods that are most common in each country.
Implement Cart Abandonment Notifications
Despite your efforts to simplify the purchase as much as possible, visitors still abandon their shopping carts. To address this, you can use email notifications about abandoned shopping carts. The reasons for incomplete purchases can vary, but that doesn't mean the visitor can't return to the site. Therefore, abandoned cart notifications are a practical trick you can try at different intervals.
