Five tips to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate
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Current status of shopping cart abandonment rates
Do you also face such troubles?
Customers add items to their shopping cart but do not complete the checkout. You are not the only one. I believe this is a problem that every e-commerce merchant will encounter - abandoned shopping cart. In fact, although the situation in each industry is different, the general shopping cart abandonment rate is about 68%. What is more worthy of our attention is that according to the [analysis report] done by Salecycle (https://blog.salecycle.com/featured/infographic-remarketing-report-q3-2017/ (opens in a new tab)):
The Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate (opens in a new tab) (Cart Abandonment) of the world’s top 500 brands in the third quarter of 2017 increased by 1.5% compared with the previous quarter, hitting a new high of 78.4%!
Five Tips to Reduce Abandonment Rates
There are often many reasons why customers abandon their shopping carts, such as complicated and lengthy checkout processes, poor user experience, etc. So, here are five simple tips you can use to reduce your cart abandonment rate with ease.
Streamline the checkout process and show progress
According to Salecycle statistics, lengthy checkout processes are the main cause of abandoned shopping carts. Customers will leave the website because they feel frustrated by the complicated checkout process. Therefore, shortening the checkout process to four steps or even less becomes your top priority. At the same time, showing the checkout progress can more clearly let customers understand their current steps and what steps they still need to go through to complete the checkout. Through this little trick, the shopping cart abandonment rate caused by the complicated checkout process can be effectively improved.
Accept more payment methods
When customers find that merchants do not provide suitable payment methods, they will choose to abandon their shopping carts. This situation may occur when customers do not have a suitable credit card or preferred payment method at checkout. The way to reduce this probability is to provide more options, such as accepting all standard credit cards and cash cards, or cooperating with third-party payment companies with high usage rates. These are all measures to make the checkout step of payment smoother for customers.
Clearly mark shipping costs
Unclearly marked shipping charges are also one of the main causes of abandoned shopping carts. Shopping cart abandonment occurs when customers only discover the additional shipping charges at the final step of the checkout process—payment. Therefore, only by clearly calculating the shipping cost when the product is added to the shopping cart and clearly displaying it from beginning to end can the shopping cart abandonment rate due to shipping costs be reduced.
Reduce page load time
I believe everyone knows that the loading time of the page greatly affects the sales of e-commerce websites. If the page loads too slowly, it will affect the customer’s desire to purchase and the user experience, thereby affecting the conversion rate. At this time, you can use the detection tool PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab) provided by Google to understand where your e-commerce website can be improved? This will avoid the shopping cart abandonment rate caused by long page loading times.
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Optimize user experience on mobile devices
Commerce on mobile is growing rapidly, however, conversion rates on mobile devices are still much lower than on desktop versions. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that the Consumption Experience of the website’s mobile device users is simple and easy. Of course, responsive design (RWD) is the best solution; at the same time, it is also necessary to ensure that mobile version users do not need to spend too much effort filling out lengthy forms or going through too complicated checkout processes, so as to effectively reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate on mobile devices.
Shopping cart abandonment is a headache for every e-commerce merchant, and of course, there are more ways to deal with it! These five simple tips introduced in this article can help you reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate initially and easily.
Well, let’s give it a try today!
Have you ever abandoned your shopping cart online?
Tell us why? #ECommerce (opens in a new tab)
— SaleCycle (@SaleCycle) January 20, 2016 (opens in a new tab)
★ Photo Credit: Astralweb Co., Ltd. (opens in a new tab)
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
