Running an on-line B2C business on a highly competitive market isn’t easy. If the customer will meet any obstacles in the buying process, it’s very likely he will leave and buy from your competitors. Are you sure you have the right cart abandonment recovery strategy in place?
The reasons why
As an ecommerce industry, shopping cart abandonment is one of the the most serious obstacles in terms of increasing sales. Basically this is a situation when customers add items to their shopping carts but decide to leave the site without purchasing. The recent Baymard Institute’s research examines the main reasons for abandonment. 58.6% of respondents “were just browsing/not ready to buy”, and these actions are unfortunately inevitable, however by analyzing other reasons, you are able to optimize your website. First of all, 50% of users pick the high extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) as the biggest obstacle, others are the site demand an account creation (28%), too long/complicated checkout process (21%), complications with displaying real total cost (18%), slow delivery process (18%), trust issues connected with credit cards (17%), website error (12%) or unsatisfactory returns policy (10%).
What can I do?
You can tackle each of the reasons why customers leave the cart with some changes in your store to increase their customer experience and leave them without excuses not to buy. For instance: there are various ways to enable guest checkout. Firstly, you can offer free shipping for orders with price over X EUR – this is a huge psychological difference when your customers see a possibility like that. What’s more, offering multiple payment options will limit finding arguments not to buy. Including a strong CTA on checkout pages will eliminate any possible confusion – instead of using simple “Continue”, test others, more active verbs and design them in the most presenting way. Simplifying the checkout process by eliminating any possible surprises can still have a huge impact on the number of people who abandon the cart – be exceptionally clear with all costs upfront, shipping at least. Also, do you know that as far as ecommerce shopping experience goes, conversion rates drop 7% for every second of delay in page loading? Analyze all the possible on-page technical elements that can slow down the loading process and fix them right away.
Automate the cart recovery
If the changes that you introduced to your store haven’t worked, hope is not lost yet. There are various ways of automating the communication with the customer that wants to leave or already left your store without finishing the purchase.
Configure automated campaigns that will:
- show live chat windows with an offer of help to customers who spend too much time in the checkout
- display exit intent pop-up with information on the time-limited free shipping or a discount if the user wants to close the browser
- send dynamic e-mails containing products left in the cart and use added value offers to get the customer back to the checkout
- retarget the customer with ads on Facebook informing about the unfinished purchase
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