What is Cart Abandonment?
You’re on your way home from work, and you stop by your local grocery store. In the middle of the frozen food aisle, next to the frozen peas, you see a shopping cart full of items on its own, completely abandoned.
What happened to the cart’s owner? Did they get distracted by the friendly samples lady by the meat and cheese department? Why did they randomly decide to abandon their cart in the frozen food aisle?
If you have an eCommerce store, you’ve asked these questions. Maybe not about the frozen peas, but you’ve wondered why this happens. Think of this picture when you see that a customer added items to their cart and did not complete their purchase through your online store. It’s a discouraging and frustrating thing to see!
Today we are going to discuss a few ways to help decrease cart abandonment, and what to do if you’ve done everything under the sun, and it still didn’t work.
Reassure Your Customers
Handing over credit card information over the internet can be a scary thing. If your site does not look trustworthy, or if something wasn’t clearly communicated, a customer might end up abandoning their cart out of fear or frustration.
Build trust and credibility with your customer by displaying security and credit card graphics. If you haven’t considered becoming a Google Trusted Store, look into it!
This is a comforting message for your customers to see, because they know if for some reason they do not receive their order, if it isn’t to their liking, or if they never receive it, they will get their money back no matter what.
Be Upfront and Honest Right Away
One of the most important things they teach you in the start your own business training programs is to be honest.
If you don’t offer free shipping, that’s okay, but make sure that your customer is able to calculate the estimated cost for shipping on the shopping cart page, before they get to the checkout page.
Once they reach your checkout page, they have a set price in mind that they are willing to spend. If the total price displayed on your checkout page ends up being more than they had anticipated, they might decide that they do not want to spend more. No one likes hidden fees!
Reduce Clicks in Checkout Process
If your checkout process requires a ton of clicks to complete the order, you are probably discouraging sales.
Your customers do not want to work to complete their order. Many who struggle to complete their order online will give up, and will not call support, or even let you know of the issue.
Minimize the amount of clicks and fields that customers need to fill out, and you will help persuade them to complete their purchase.
When All Else Fails – Reach Out!
So after all that work of reassuring your customer, being honest with them, and making the checkout process incredibly simple, your customer still abandoned their cart.
Do not despair just yet, you still have one more way that you can pull that customer back in. Reach out! Send your customer a funny or interesting abandoned cart email that expresses your brand’s unique personality, and bring them back to your store to reclaim their cart and complete their purchase!
