How to avoid shopping cart abandonment.
When your planning your e-commerce site an important topic to consider is shopping cart abandonment. You can put a lot of time and effort into your online shop and still lose shoppers at the checkout. The Baymard Institute an e-commerce research agency estimates that the average abandonment rate is near 70%. As more and more people shop online with their phones, brands are finding it hard to meet the requirements for convenience, simplicity and immediacy. But don’t worry a sound user experience can win them back.
Keep it Simple.
The average shopping cart experience has around 5 steps that need to be followed.
- Checkout
- Shipping
- Billing
- Payment
- Confirmation
The key is to make this process easier. The main reason for consumers dropping out at the checkout is filling out tedious and time consuming forms. Four out of the top five reasons for consumers abandoning at the checkout is because of entering information.
How to make the process easier for your customer.
Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering, for example, allows a shopper to use their saved payment and shipping information to literally make a purchase with one click of a button.
- Enable auto fill forms – so consumers don’t have to manually fill in shipping and payment information. Go one step further and offer to save this information for future purchases.
- Keep everything on the checkout page – If you offer discount codes make them available on the checkout page. One option is to offer a “tap it” option where consumers tap a button at the start of their shopping journey to automatically apply the discount to their online shopping cart.
- Visual Design – Paying attention to how colour and design affect your customer. The colour red typically flags warnings to customers, so seeing red on your checkout page could make them cautious about processing an order.
- Follow up – Nearly half of the customers who have abandoned their shopping cart open follow up emails and more than a third of email clicks led shoppers back to purchases on the retailer’s website.
Mobile the way forward.
Mobile is playing a huge role in how people shop. The challenge for us is to take their experience to the next level. Simplifying the checkout process is a step in the right direction.