With so much talk in the media about the rise of e-commerce and the downfall of brick-and-mortar retail, one might imagine online sellers are sitting back and counting their revenues as the sales rack up. The truth is, though, online shoppers abandon their shopping carts all too often, with estimates ranging from nearly 60% to almost 70% of carts having items left in them without a purchase being made.
When online customers fail to convert, all of the careful effort and planning a retailer takes to get them to the site and interested in buying becomes moot. Fortunately, there are ways to streamline and optimize the digital buying experience to help ensure customers don’t leave a retail site without buying the items they’ve placed in their baskets. To learn how to decrease the shopping cart abandonment rate, read on for tips from the members of Forbes Communications Council.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Make Shoppers Feel Good About The Purchase
Set up notifications on your website based on certain triggers so that when a potential customer adds a product to their cart, a notification appears saying, “Wow, you have great taste!” You can also add a sense of urgency through notifications, such as, “X number of people have this saved in their cart.” – Brittany Garlin, Vista Social
2. Minimize The Steps Needed To Check Out
Optimizing the entire checkout process is crucial. Start by limiting friction points and click debt. Look for unnecessary or redundant informational fields that can be combined or eliminated. Minimizing the steps needed to complete the checkout process will reduce click debt and help avoid late-stage cart abandonment. – Luke Mars, Innago
3. Integrate With The Most Common Payment Providers
One of the most impactful ways to not lose customers at the very end is to make sure you are integrated with the most common payment providers. Your customer may not have their credit card in hand or may not want to type in all that info again when they are used to using Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon or another payment provider. – Larry Beaman, gen. video
4. Make Shipping Costs As Transparent As Possible
Make your shipping costs as transparent as possible throughout your customer journey. This way, when your customers get to the final stages of checking out and seeing the shipping costs, they are not surprised and won’t abandon their carts. – Roshni Wijayasinha, Prosh Marketing
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5. Offer Filters To Help Customers Find The Right Product
The problem that most e-commerce retailers face is that they have so many products but not as many filters. This makes it difficult for shoppers to be sure that the product they are looking at is the right one, so they jump from one to another. People always try to find