Reducing Online Shopping Cart Abandonment: 7 Best Practices

Cart abandonment is a major issue faced by ecommerce businesses. With almost 7 out of 10 shoppers abandoning their carts, online businesses face an uphill task to increase sales and profits.

While it’s nearly impossible to eliminate cart abandonment, there are steps to reduce it. This guide contains those steps – and much more!

Below are 7 best practices on how to reduce cart abandonment, thus increasing sales and profit for your ecommerce business. But before we dive into that, let’s briefly discuss the problem of shopping cart abandonment…

What Is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Shopping cart abandonment is when online shoppers add items to their cart but leave the site without completing the purchase. Items that enter the online shopping cart but aren’t paid for are considered “abandoned” by the customer.

While it’s normal for customers to abandon their carts, a high cart abandonment rate often leads to low conversion rates, sales, and lost revenue.

To reduce shopping cart abandonment, you need to first understand the root causes.

Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

Common reasons for online shopping cart abandonment are:

Excessive Upselling

Upselling is a good way to increase revenue and customer lifetime value. However, when used excessively, upselling can overwhelm or annoy customers, causing them to abandon their carts. Use non-pushy upselling techniques and only provide upsells that match customers’ needs.

Uncompetitive Pricing

Not all online shoppers visit your store to buy; some visit to compare pricing. These shoppers will abandon their cart and buy from your competitors if they are offered a better deal.

You can avoid losing customers to your competitors by matching or beating their prices. Alternatively, highlighting the unique selling points and special features of your product is another good way to stand out from the competition.

Forced Account Creation

By forcing customers to open an account before making a purchase, you complicate the checkout process. This often leads to cart abandonment.

Customers want to visit your online store, add products to their cart, and checkout with a few clicks. They don’t want to go through the time-consuming process of creating an account.

Few Payment Options

Did you know that 9% of online shoppers will abandon their carts if the checkout lacks their preferred payment option?

Many online shoppers prefer to complete transactions with their preferred and trusted payment option. By offering multiple payment options, you make this possible.

Common payment options to include in your checkout are:

• Credit and debit card
• Bank transfer
• Digital wallets (PayPal, Apple Pay, etc.)
• Cryptocurrency

Offering multiple payment options helps improve customer’s trust and confidence. It also provides them with a convenient way to pay for their purchases, thus reducing the cart abandonment rate.

Cluttered Web Page

A cluttered web page is like a messy closet; it confuses shoppers, making it hard for them to locate important information on your webpage. This could lead to frustration, causing shoppers to abandon their carts and shop somewhere else.

To declutter your webpage, eliminate pop-ups, notifications, and other distracting elements. Use a simple and clear web page design to improve conversion rate and reduce cart abandonment.

Unexpected Shipping Cost

When unexpected shipping costs raise the overall cost of a product, it disrupts the customer’s buying experience, causing them to rethink their purchase. No one wants to be slapped with a fee that wasn’t disclosed earlier in the checkout process. It can result in frustration, disappointment, and mistrust, causing customers to abandon their carts and shop elsewhere.

Clearly state the shipping costs at the early stages of the checkout process to prevent last-minute surprises that may put customers off. Alternatively, you can consider eliminating the shipping cost by bundling it with the price of the product.

Complicated Checkout Process

Customers expect the checkout process to be seamless, user-friendly, and straightforward.

Unfortunately, the reverse is usually the case.

Many online businesses’ checkout processes consist of numerous forms and steps that may hinder customers from experiencing a smooth checkout process. To fix this, reduce steps and data entry to optimize the checkout process, reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Site Security Concerns

Does your website have SSL seal trust badges?

No?

That is a red flag.

The lack of SSL seals and trust badges on your website raises security concerns, causing customers to abandon their carts and flee your site. Customers want to be sure that their financial and personal information is safe and secure before making payment on your site. In fact, according to Baymard Institute, 18% of customers are reluctant to surrender their credit card details to ecommerce sites they don’t trust.

To make your website trustworthy, add recognizable trust badges, security seals, and similar stamps that provide visual reinforcement of trust. You should also include social proof like customer testimonials and product reviews to put shoppers’ minds at ease.

IMAGE [a tiny shopping cart in front of a laptop]

How to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Having understood the reasons why customers abandon their cart, how do you reduce it?

Here are a few helpful tips on how to reduce cart abandonment.

1. Offer Guest Checkout Options

Your customers want to spend little time on the checkout process. They don’t want to fill out multiple forms or go through many steps to complete a purchase. It’s time-consuming, inconvenient, and adds friction to the checkout process.

To make the checkout process seamless and smooth, offer guest checkout options. This allows customers to make a purchase without creating an account or logging in. By simplifying the checkout process, you encourage customers to complete their purchases without abandoning their carts.

You also encourage repeat purchases, as customers love businesses that make buying easy. Eventually, previous customers will consider creating accounts to leverage incentives, allowing you to gather the necessary customer data your business craves.

Ensure you make the guest checkout option obvious and don’t request too much information. Limit your request to important information like shipping address, billing method, and payment option. This helps streamline the guest checkout process, encouraging customers to complete their purchases with ease.

2. Add thumbnails of products throughout the checkout process

Imagine this scenario:

A customer adds some jewelry, skincare products, and personal care items to their cart. During the checkout process, they forget what they are buying. Or perhaps they added a customizable item, like a TV set, and want to confirm that they selected the right spec for their kid’s room.

Most times, shoppers delete the items in their cart, return to the product page to recheck the specs, and abandon the purchase. Adding thumbnails and a summary of key product specifications at each stage of the checkout process allows customers to review their selections and complete their purchases with confidence. This leads to increased sales and reduced cart abandonment rate.

3. Be Upfront about the Costs

Unexpected fees at checkout are a turnoff. It can lead to frustration and discomfort for customers, causing them to abandon their carts.

Being upfront with your handling, taxes, and shipping fees helps build trust and improves customer satisfaction. It also improves brand loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases.

In addition to shipping fees, being crystal-clear about the delivery time reduces uncertainty, encouraging customers to checkout. Providing customers with a vague or indeterminate delivery time estimate will force them to reconsider their purchase, thus increasing the shopping cart abandonment rate.

4. Provide Alternative Payment Options

Customers will abandon their cart if their preferred payment option isn’t available on your checkout page.

The reason for this is simple.

With the rise in cyber threats and data breaches, online shoppers prefer to use a payment method they are familiar with, especially one they trust. This puts their mind at ease, knowing fully well that their financial information is secured. Plus, it enhances their convenience.

Include alternative payment options to accommodate customer preferences. Alternatively, you can save money and boost customer convenience by leveraging Payment Savvy software with an all-in-one payment solution.

With Payment Savvy’s payment solutions, e-commerce businesses can offer customers a fast, easy, and reliable way to make payments. The customizable ecommerce payment solution can be tailored to suit your business needs while helping you maximize sales without incurring high transactional costs. By providing customers with an all-in-one payment solution, you’ll improve their buying experience and reduce cart abandonment.

5. Improve Your Website Performance

Does your website take forever to load? Or does it crash midway to the end of the checkout process?

Website performance issues can disrupt the checkout process, causing customers to abandon their carts and shop somewhere else. To improve customer user experience, monitor your website performance using web analytic tools.

Check its loading time, bounce rates, and conversion rates. You should also perform regular testing to pinpoint issues and areas that require optimization. Don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile devices to prevent smartphone or tablet users from encountering usability issues.

6. Retarget Cart Abandoners

E-commerce businesses lose up to 75% of sales as a result of cart abandoners.

The good news?

With effective retargeting strategies, online stores can bring up to 26% of lost customers back to their sites.

You can retarget cart abandoners using different methods.

You can go with the traditional methods, which involve leveraging smart retargeting ads. These ads can be displayed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Alternatively, you can use email retargeting. This involves setting up a cart abandonment email campaign to win shoppers back. You can also use abandoned cart popups triggered by customers exiting a page without checking out. The pop-ups should highlight key USPs of your products and provide incentives designed to encourage customers to return to their carts and complete their purchases.

With the right retargeting strategy, online businesses can reduce cart abandonment rates and improve brand recall.

7. Streamline the checkout process

Looking for how to reduce cart abandonment?

Shorten and simplify the checkout process!

Customers appreciate online businesses with a straightforward checkout process. It enhances their shopping experience, encouraging repeat purchases. If your checkout process involves numerous steps and forms or, worse, forced login, customers will abandon their carts.

You’ll end up losing the sale and the customer to a competitor with a simple and smooth checkout process. To streamline your checkout process, offer one-step checkout like Amazon. Alternatively, look for ways to reduce the steps in the checkout process.

You can also offer guest checkout options, which allow customers to purchase items without signing in. After implementing these changes, monitor their effects on your conversion rates. If it’s good, stick with the changes. If not, try something else.

Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment with Payment Savvy E-commerce Processing Solutions.

Reducing cart abandonment is about locating the bottlenecks in the checkout process and addressing them effectively. The lack of alternative payment options is one such bottleneck, and it can be easily addressed by leveraging Payment Savvy, an all-in-one e-commerce processing solution.

This payment solution allows your online business to accept all electronic forms of payment, ensuring that customers have their preferred payment method at their fingertips. It also provides your customers with a convenient, secure, and straightforward ecommerce payment solution with the highest security and zero hidden fees.

Get in touch with us today, and let us help you reduce your cart abandonment rates with our customizable, convenient, all-in-one ecommerce payment solutions.