EworksWSI Cyprus Digital Marketing Blog

How to fight shopping cart abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the most important factors impacting conversions.

Resarch has shown that approx 68% of all visitors of e-commerce sites abandon their shopping carts, totalling a value of 3.5 trillion €.

The good news is that 63% of this amount is potentially  recoverable. But how?

As a start, we try to understand what does visitors motivate to abandon their shopping cart instead of completing their purchase.

Why do visitors abandon their shipping carts:

28% Unexpected shipping cost - mostly if the shipping cost is not clearly marked before, people progress through the

the checkout process until the total cost including shipping is displayed.

16% Not ready to buy yet - and using the shopping cart as a kind of wishlist to store their selection for later.

13% Payment security concerns

12% Poor User experience

8% Failed to find a Coupon code

Several parameters will condition the success of your ecommerce checkout page.

Only an optimized mix of these will make the checkout process perfect as most carts are abandoned during checkout, only a few before checkout, i.e. a customer adds a product to the shopping cart and gets distracted, switches to something else and the cart will be abandoned.  

We defined the following four factors essential for the construction of your checkout page:

• Functionality - maximum of 3 steps, simple shipping choices, don't force new customers to register, make sure all functionality is working - a coupon cannot be applied - the customer has less probability to continue the checkout process
  
• Usability - clear buttons indicating what to do next, each field clearly labled. Make it easy for your customers: Shipping and Invoice address are the same? Have the fields prefilled with a simple click of a button.
  
• Security - verified payment gateways, https protocol
  
• Design - clear minimalistic design, no distraction with banners and offers
  

Your Ecommerce customers want to see the final cart with all charges, taxes and shipping cost before they are willing to put in their personal details.

Consider to offer a guest checkout, by either displaying the cart without any request for personal details or only their email address.

Sign up can be simplified if you offer a 1-click sign-up through their social media accounts (Sign-up with your Facebook or Twitter account).

When returning users log into their accounts at this stage (or are already logged in), they should be clearly recognized, welcomed and all fields should be pre-filled with existing information.

Make it easy & fast

Many customers do their shopping online because they are in a rush and are willing to wait.

If your ecommerce site or shopping cart is too slow then there’s little chance to conclude the sale.

The whole checkout process should be less than a few minutes long: You can help them with the following functionalities:

Prefill fields where possible:

• shipping / invoicing addresses
  
• look up automatically addresses and postcodes
• Visually indicate errors or missing fields, make it easy and fast to fix it. Don't have them re-enter all information from the beginning.
• Ask only the strictly necessary information for the sale (Contact and shipping information), don't add any fields for your marketing purposes (gender, number of persons in household, etc...) 
  

The Cart page

Most carts are abandoned at this stage. You need to take particular care of your shopping cart page that generally includes

• a list of the products that have been added to the cart,
• the tax amount,
• shipping options,
• gift vouchers or
• reduction/discount codes

Make sure all information is displayed clearly in an easily readable font, the "BUY NOW" CTA is outstanding. Let shoppers review their cart, as they would in-store, give them the option to change the quantity of an item, or remove items from their cart and have the final price updated automatically.

The final price is important, it should be really final, no additional or hidden fees that popup later.

Tax and shipping cost should be clearly displayed. In general, free shipping is a big incentive and if the ecommerce owner offers it,

Delivery cost (0.00€) should be marked.

Here are some factors that will increase the cart conversion rate, i.e. reduce the cart abandon rate:

• Include a picture of the cart items
  92.6% of shoppers say visuals are the top influencing factor that affects their buying decision. And product pictures need to be excellent as your customers cannot touch their items.
  
  
• Allow items to be saved for later (whish-list)
  Shoppers use the shopping often to store products they like for later. They are not ready to buy at this stage but they are interested in an item, check the total cost including shipping and tax and want to save it for later not to go through the research process again. You may add the 'Save this item for later' option, we call it a wishlist. Shoppers need to be logged into their account on your site and can add items to their wish-list and retrieve them later. As users are identified you can setup a followup process and retarget shoppers with items on their wish-list. 
  
  
• Retarged abandoned cart items
  By using the wishlist consumers indicate that they are really interested in a product and 54% of shoppers say they would purchase products left in their cart/whish-list if offered again at a discounted price. You may email them a discount code to be applied on their products. We recommend to be rather careful when using automatic PPC re-targeting (products are marked through cookies and your ad is popping up on other websites when the users continues browsing) and test it thoroughly as retargeting ads are often seen as intrusive.