Did you know that the majority of potential customers leave an online store without buying anything? There are several reasons why people abandon their online shopping carts. These may include the requirement to create an account,payment security issues, long checkout process, unclear pricing, unexpected shipping fee, or bad website.
At first, customers abandoning their online shopping carts may not seem like a big problem. But it can cause your online store great pain – you’re losing sales and revenue. Shopping cart abandonment may also cause product unavailability, wasted energy and time, bad user experience, and skewed site analytics. If your online store is currently having problems with cart abandonment, then our tips below can help.
1. Provide guest checkout
The requirement to create a new account can be a barrier for customers to checkout. This is extra work for many shoppers, making them think that buying from your store is too much hassle. Avoid requiring shoppers to create an account on your online shop when not necessary. Instead, provide them with an easy and quick guest checkout option. Allow them to access your store as a guest and just provide them with a choice to create an account after the checkout.
2. Guarantee safe and fast delivery
Shoppers never favor a store that takes longer to deliver. Plus, if you can’t guarantee safe and quick delivery, customers will likely leave the items in their carts and find another shop. The worst part is, they won’t go back if they find a store that can meet their delivery expectations.
Reduce shopping cart abandonment by promoting hassle-free and fast delivery to your customers. If you can’t handle this in-house, it’s better to work with local delivery partners such as Singapore Delivery Services to guarantee safe and prompt deliveries. These delivery service providers can give you access to expert drivers, flexible reverse logistics solutions, and assure on-time deliveries.
3. Show active contact details
Customers who aren’t certain if they can trust your shop won’t proceed to check out even if your products look great. Plus, you can physically walk them through your shop or personally answer their questions. What you can do is to guide them virtually. One easy way to do this is by making your contact information visible on your online shop website.
The more options your customers have to get in touch with you, the better. Allow them to register a complaint, make a suggestion, or ask a question. Most importantly, the provided communication avenues should be active and monitored. Giving out such details can show the customers that you care and you’re available to attend to their concerns.
4. Use a checkout progress indicator
Going through a checkout process that you don’t know how long can be annoying for any customer. You can prevent this poor experience by using a checkout progress indicator. Doing so enables you to remove the potential worry of your customers purchasing from your online shop. At the same time, it makes your entire checkout process easier and clearer.
When creating your progress indicator, make sure it only includes a few steps to make the process less intimidating and dragging. Among the steps to include are access checkout, billing, delivery information, payment, and order confirmation.
5. Establish a sense of urgency
Creating a sense of urgency is a popular approach for businesses looking to encourage more customers into making a purchase. Obviously, this is also a good strategy to minimize abandoned shopping carts in your online store. Inform the shoppers about your time-limited promotions and deals.
Creating a countdown timer is currently the most effective way to do this. You can choose to use dynamic countdown timers or static ones for your campaigns. Use the timer that works best for your shop. By adding a dose of urgency into your offers, you can motivate shoppers into proceeding to checkout right away.
6. Send out cart abandonment emails
Cart abandonment emails are not popular in the e-commerce business. This marketing tactic is effective for reminding the shoppers about the items in their carts and encouraging them to proceed to checkout. You can conveniently notify your customers about the items in their carts by setting up an autoresponder email. On the following days, you can send out additional emails to the shoppers. Just make sure not to send too many emails as this is an absolute turn-off for customers. You might end up annoying them instead of encouraging them to make a purchase.
The impact of shopping cart abandonment can be damaging to your business’ operations and revenue. Don’t ignore this problem and start working on how you can reduce the number of customers abandoning their shopping carts. By doing so, you can protect customer lifetime value, improve inventory management, and avoid higher retargeting and customer acquisition costs.