We all know how hard it is to get sales on your site, but we’re here to help you find ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment on your online store. Let’s dive right into it

•56% of consumers left due to unexpected costs (for example extra shipping or taxes)

Needless to say that people don’t care much for shipping fees nowadays. A simple suggestion would be to just always put your prices a little higher if you want to add shipping cost included into the price.

•37% made no purchase because they were just browsing

We all know how much people love to window shop, works the same way on the internet. Time to catch their attention with stunning ads and beautiful products on your site.

•36% found a better price after comparison-shopping

Be sure to do your research, people do not tend to buy products they can find cheaper elsewhere.

•25% left because the navigation was too complicated

Simplify your website, a lot of your visitors are also on mobile, make it real easy to browse and buy.•21% felt the process took too long

•17% were concerned about security

So to help some of your frustrations and reduce your rate of abandonment, take a look at my recommended and proven solutions.

1. Minimise price shock.

Unexpected costs typically relate to shipping costs that pop up nearer the end of the checkout process. To help, make sure you’re transparent with your shipping costs when the customer is browsing through your products. This will also help build trust for you because you will be providing a thoughtful approach. If you are able to, another approach is to reduce your shipping costs by offering either free or discounted shipping based on the order value.

Now some of you maybe wandering what to do when your shipping costs are variable. The simple answer is to incorporate a calculator. You’ll need to add a button to your product page which will calculate the estimated shipping cost for your customer before they go to the shopping cart. You can simply just install a plugin or ifyou use Shopify, then you can use one of their themes that has a shipping rate calculator built in or add a shipping rate calculator to any theme.

2. Increase the trust.

Though there are many methods to increase trust without aiming to (above point), the easiest way to improve trust in the buying process is to show your customer that their information is secure. To do this, have a valid SSL certificate. If it’s out of date or improperly installed, your customers will see a warning message in their browser that the connection might not be secure.

Another idea is to show trust symbols on your site such as well-known security logos. However, be aware that not all trust badges have an equal effect. It has been suggested that customers have the best sense of trust when seeing a Norton badge, McAfee badge, TUSTe badge and a BBB badge.

3. Cart abandonment emails.

A likely scenario from an abandoned cart is that you’ve managed to capture their email address. With this information, Set up an autoresponder email to notify them that they’ve left items in their cart. Follow this up with 1 or 2 other emails spread out over the next 24 hours. Display the items they’ve left in their cart alongside a call-to-action to return to your website and complete the process. If they don’t, one of your future emails can be an offer or a discount to encourage a sale.

4. Improve your visuals.

From your online store, your customers can’t physically touch and examine the products. This means it’s harder for them to determine whether the product meets their wants and needs, making them less likely to make a purchase. In order to reduce this adversity, you could add multiple product photos from every angle, use high-resolution images, use action images and show the product actively in use and add videos to your product pages that highlight the benefits.

5. Simplify your sites navigation.

It’s been said that the more clicks you put someone through, the more likely they are to leave before completing a purchase. You’ll need to eliminate any unnecessary pages and streamline the process.

An easy structure to go by is:

Choose a produce

Add to cart

Click “Checkout” button

6. Incorporate social proof.

You can add social proof to your site in a number of different ways:

•Follow up with customers and ask them to provide a product review

•Feature reviews on product pages and list testimonials on other landing pages of your site

•Add applications like ‘Notify’ to your store to show customers who else is purchasing your products

7. Remarketing / Retargeting your visitors.

Getting a Facebook tracking pixel placed on your site can gather visitor behaviour and store data while attaching a cookie to the visitor. You can then create a Facebook ad campaign targeting custom audiences.

8. Identify Funnel Leaks.

Rather than testing various conversion issues or making assumptions about what is going wrong, examine the visitor flow and conversion pathways in google analytics. You’ll get factual results to work from, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Some quick fire tips that I’ve needed from a customer point of view include:

 8.1. Enable guest checkout

From a customers point of view, its not the most ideal approach to create an account prior to checkout. Not only does this slow down the process, but most customers may actually bounce. You can always ask them to sign up for an account at the end, after they’ve already made their purchase.

 8.2. Include thumbnail images of products in the purchasing phase.

including thumbnail images of the products they’ve placed in their cart is another technique that reassures the customer of what they’re purchasing.

There are many reasons for customers to abandon their carts. Reasons such as, high shipping costs, not ready to purchase, high product price, too much information, no guest option, complexity, slow site speed or slow shipping. No matter how you run your site, you will not satisfy everyone. You have to understand that it is impossible to prevent all cart abandonments. All you can do is reduce the rate of abandonment by incorporating my recommendations.

Looking to convert more visitors into paying customers. Contact us, we’re here to help.