Shopping cart abandonment issues are a big problem for many companies in e-commerce. 88% of users leave a website before making a purchase. That means people see products they like but get distracted by something before finishing their transaction. Shopping cart abandonment effects can influence your quantity and volume of sales. Fortunately, there are ways to get around this obstacle! You need to learn the way to encourage shoppers to get into the checkout lane.
Table of Contents
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment is when shoppers add items to their cart but then leave before buying the items. It happens all the time and is hard to stop in the world of online business. Fortunately, there are ways to help push your shoppers to make transactions instead of leaving their online cart in the middle of the imaginary aisle.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Effects on Business
The problem with having abandoned shopping carts is that it can lead to real customers not being able to buy products. Bots fill carts with products that can remove the inventory for other users. Some businesses allow all inventory to be solid no matter if it is in the cart or not. Others have a time limit for how long a product is held in the cart. This can directly impact sales either way. When bots are stuffing carts full of products it can make your website lag because of the number of people logged onto your website filling carts. For other users that log on to the page, this can give them a horrible user experience. Users might have to deal with slow-loading pages which makes it time consuming to look at your page and shop around. This ultimately will lead consumers to your competition, instead of to your website. To avoid this, you need to be prepared by adding elements to help users make purchases.
Ways to Help Digital Shopping Cart Abandonment
Figuring out ways to help reduce your business’s shopping cart abandonment issues can take time to implement and build onto your website. Here are ways to help get people to buy instead of only looking at your items.
Establish Trust
When it comes to online stores, people put a lot of trust in the business. They provide the website with personal and credit card information. Many people will not buy from an online store if it appears to be a scam. To show people you are credible, you want to make sure you have a clean design layout. Looks are everything on an e-commerce website. After you have a clean layout, adding security logos next to transaction forms can help ease some hesitation. Many users won’t purchase items if these logos are missing or if they don’t recognize the software. Establishing trust comes down to making the customer feel like they aren’t about to end up with credit card fraud and that their information is safe with your business.
Speed Up the Checkout Process
Showing the customer that they only have three steps to complete to buy a product can make the transaction process easier. If someone has to type in a bunch of information and fill out multiple checkboxes, it could cause the consumer to leave because the process is too much work. Laying out the simple steps allows the user to know they are almost there. People are busy and like to know they will be able to move through quickly. After all, no one likes standing in a check-out line with the cashier asking too many questions.
Offer Different Payment Methods
In today’s world, there are a variety of ways people prefer to pay. Depending on your target audience, you want to provide different ways to appeal to each person. You want to have credit card options, but including features like Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Wallet, Venmo, and other forms of mobile pay create less friction to complete a transaction. Most users are online shopping on their phones and might not want to grab their card and type the information in. Having a variety of options can allow the user to select what they want.
Allow Guest Checkout
Not everyone wants to take time to make an account when shopping. Although it might be easier the next time the user shops, it takes time to fill in the information. It is one of the leading causes of online cart abandonment. The information your business can gather on your audience is great but if it leads to abandonment, maybe you should focus on that first. If your shop has an feature for signing in, adding a guest check out could help your sales. Most e-commerce businesses shouldn’t have a place to create an account. Adding an email to a list and creating an account are two different things. Creating an account is adding personal information that takes away from the checkout process. Adding an email to a list is something the user signs up for voluntarily. Don’t be the website with a ton of pop-up advertisements that are hard to get rid of. If the user knows they won’t have to spend too long in the checkout line, it might encourage them to make a transaction.
Optimize On-Page SEO
How long does it take your website to load? If it doesn’t load in a couple of seconds, users are going to drop out. If you optimize your on-page SEO, it helps make sure everything is running smoothly on your website. It also gives your shop more visibility for clients and search engines to like you more. This includes using keywords, deleting add-ons you don’t utilize, and optimizing photos for faster load time.
Lower Shopping Cart Abandonment
Users abandoning shopping carts can negatively affect your shop. A rate is calculated by dividing the number of completed transactions by the number of translations started. This helps you see the number of people that intend to buy something but never complete the transaction. If your e-commerce site has a high abandonment rate, this could be bad user experience, which does not lead to conversions on your site. Something called remarketing is an innovative way to fight online shopping cart abandonment. Remarketing is finding people who have already engaged with your company and directly targeting them.
Ways to Remarket
You can remarket to consumers by using many marketing strategies out there, but you will be using them on a certain group of engaged people. You don’t have to target everyone who has already engaged for remarketing. Use other analytics that you have on users. You could see if they can afford your product based on their occupation or location. You can send things to people who are a certain age group. There are many different ways to target customers. This helps establish that you are reaching your target market. Companies that remarket see high levels of conversion rates because it reminds the user of a brand they already noticed. There are several ways you can implement remarketing into your business.
Use Social Media
Social media is a place where your target audience can be found. There are many options in selecting what platform to choose to advertise on. It all comes down to knowing your audience and where they will be. You will want to focus on certain keywords that will target exactly who you want to reach to make conversions. There is a big audience, but you can narrow down the relevancy of your ad to the user.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Don’t sleep on e-mail marketing. It is still an extremely effective way to tell people what you want them to know. You put your business directly in front of the audience you want to connect with. After a user places an item in the cart, you can add a feature that asks the user to place their email. Then, if the cart is abandoned, you can send a friendly reminder email that pushes the user to not forget about an item they placed in their cart. It helps make conversions from just the initial wanting to buy to following through, especially if you provide a discount for the purchase. One aspect that holds a lot of customers from making a purchase is the cost of shipping. By running promotions where your shop offers free shipping, you can make the user jump on this deal. This can better incentivize the consumer to follow through on their purchase.
Using PPC (Pay Per Click) Ads
Using advertisements to help target those who already took an initial interest in your brand could give consumers the push they need to make a purchase. This is great if you didn’t get their email address. Marketing through e-mail is a very effective way that people will notice. PPC ads that you retarget to the user are another powerful tool as well. You can do this by placing an ad pixel on your checkout page. You can then remarket to that person in the form of website advertisements. PPC ads are advertisements that use keywords. You can differentiate groups you want to target by adding specific keywords and other criteria. These ads can be a great ROI.
Retarget Users to Make a Transaction
If one of your biggest problems is shopping cart abandonment, you are not alone. Don’t think there is nothing you can do. You can use strategic tactics to help browsers become customers. There are several ways to combat this issue. SEO Design Chicago can help no matter what direction you choose to go. We offer help with advertisements, SEO, email marketing, and so much more that can help increase the sales of your e-commerce website. Whether you are looking for help or just searching for advice, we want your business to maximize your success.
FAQs
- How does shopping cart abandonment affect online shopping?
- Why is cart abandonment a problem?
- How do I calculate my cart abandonment rate?
- What are the effects of shopping cart abandonment?
- How to use retargeting for shopping cart abandonment issues?
Contact Us Today!