6 Ways To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Looking for ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment on your website? We’ve got all the tips you’ll need right here, so be sure to dive in.

Let’s face it — shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems any online business could face. And on average, two-thirds of people who get to that final stage of the buying process will turn back and leave your website. Sure, you can make things better by following all the latest web design trends, but you can do plenty on top of it.

Here are the six practices you should follow to increase your conversion rate and grow your revenue.

1. Offer Free Shipping

It turns out that the most common reason why people leave a website at the checkout is that they’re presented with an unexpected cost. If they feel like they have to pay extra to get the things they like, most people will bounce right back to search.

And one of the places where it might seem you’re asking for extra is when you’re asking them to pay for shipping. Thus, the easiest way to quickly bump up your sales is to offer free shipping. However, there’s more to the story than that. Depending on what you’re selling, it might not make sense to offer such deals for all your products. But, what can you do?

For example, if you’re selling cheap products, you can offer free shipping for orders that exceed a certain amount of money. So, if they order $50 worth of stuff, they get it at their doorstep for free. You’ll motivate people to spend more, and your business will thrive. 

In essence, you want to calculate your profit margin and see when it makes sense for you to pay for shipping. Work out a few deals, and people will start coming in.

2. Use Exit-Intent Popups To Make People Stay

If you’re taking your website seriously, then the chances are that you have a content marketing strategy in place. In essence, it’s there to educate people about your product. However, when you know how to use your content wisely, you also generate demand for what you sell, grow your customer base, and make people aware of your brand. 

So, users come to your website to browse around and check their options without any intention to buy. There’s not much you can do about it, and that’s fine. Here, it’s all about making the most out of the situation. If you can get their contact info during these first visits and follow up via email, you’ll increase your chances of making a sale. 

And although you may not like them, exit-intent popups work very well for this purpose. People read them, so they’re a great tool to make your move. Offer a discount on the first purchase or give out free shipping in exchange for an email address, and people will be happy to take it. 

3. Offer To Match Price

Another reason why lots of people leave the cart at the checkout is that they found a better deal. So, to reduce shopping cart abandonment and make them stay with you rather than going with one of your competitors, offer to match their price. 

Of course, you can’t rely on their promise that there’s a place selling the same thing cheaper, so you’ll have to ask your customers to provide you with proof. Once they send it to you, your staff will have to go through these requests and sort them out. It’s a bit more work, but you’ll certainly get more orders. 

4. Make Your Navigation Simple

People will leave if your website isn’t intuitive and easy to use. Hence, you want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to browse your pages, find the products they like, and place their orders. 

Here are a few tips and tricks that should help you get it right.

• Add product categories to your main menu. Make your categories clear and easy to spot.
• Use a drop-down menu to list your subcategories. Spend your time making sure that every product is listed as it should be.
• Add a search bar. People love using internal search engines to browse a website, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t make it possible for them. 
• Make the shopping cart present. You want users to see the shopping cart icon on every page, and you want it to stand out. 

The more time you spend on improving your user experience, the more benefits you’ll get from it. If people like using your site, they’ll come back for more, and that’s all you need them to do. The more they stick around, the more likely they will buy from you. 

5. Make The Checkout Easy

If the process of checking out takes too long, people will start churning away. Thus, to make them stay, you need to simplify the process of finishing up their orders. 

The biggest trick here is to ask for as little information as possible. For example, a ZIP code will give you the city, state, and country. Similarly, you don’t need to ask for the credit card type, as you can figure that out from the first four digits of the card number. 

That said, be sure to always ask for the name and email first. This way, even if the user abandons the cart, you can follow up with an email and encourage them to come back and complete the purchase. 

6. Follow Through With Emails

And to finish things off, we’ve got one of the most effective ways to recover ”lost” customers — abandonment emails.

Of course, setting up a whole email marketing strategy is a big job. There are many moving parts, and you’ll have to spend some time fine-tuning them. But once you get it right, you could see as much as 30% of people who left your site coming back to complete their buying process.

Here’s how you can do it.

After they abandon the cart, send them an email asking them if something went wrong with their checkout. Then, if that doesn’t seem to do anything, send another email a day later offering them a 10% discount if they come back. And if that doesn’t yield a result, finish it off with a 20% off deal after waiting for a couple of days.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, to reduce shopping cart abandonment, you need to remove all friction that might prompt people not to complete the purchase. Get rid of unwanted surprises, spice things up with a few pleasant ones, and you’ll be surprised by how many of your site visitors will decide to stick around.