26
March

By avi maxwel / in , , , , , /

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.

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 the most value at the lowest price possible. – Santiago Vicaria, Ontop

6. Make Sure Your Digital Experience Feels Seamless

Make sure users see the information early on in the process so that there are no surprises at checkout. Enable easy cart management (including editing, quickly removing and switching products), and set clear expectations for steps (such as completion bars, text indicators and so on). And ensure information about shipping, returns and customer service is easily accessible. – Sarah Falcon, Edged Objects

7. Create Some Urgency Without It Feeling Pushy

Create some urgency for shoppers by letting them know there are only X number of products left or 10 minutes remaining to make the purchase, or offer a coupon that disappears at midnight. You can do this in a fun, helpful way that creates urgency without feeling pushy for your customers. – Christina Hager, Digital Ovations

8. Send shoppers a helpful, gentle reminder

Send a helpful reminder. It can be cute and funny, such as a message from one of the items in the cart: “Looks like you might have forgotten about me!” Often, shoppers get distracted on their phones—a text pops up, someone shares a TikTok or their mom calls. A simple, gentle reminder can help bring them back to the shopping cart. – Laurie Wang, Legal Aid Alberta

9. Give Shoppers The Ability To Save Their Carts

Let shoppers save their carts and give them cart reminders. Shoppers may intend to complete the purchase later, but they’re busy or something interrupts them. Giving them the ability to save their cart both allows you to add them to your overall marketing follow-ups and allows them to return to their shopping cart. By giving shoppers this feeling of control, you will see your conversion rate increase. – Kurt Ullir, eXp World Holdings

10. Offer Limited-Time Promotions And Recommendations

Retailers can reduce cart abandonment through various effective strategies. Offering limited-time promotions, displaying low-stock notifications, sending abandoned cart email reminders and suggesting personalized recommendations can create a sense of urgency and scarcity that motivates customers to complete purchases, resulting in increased revenue. – Marie O’Riordan, EML

11. Encourage users to log in early in their buying journey

Try to convert guest users into authenticated users early on. By increasing the rate of users logging in early in the funnel, you can both personalize the experience and reduce the user drop off rate significantly. This is similar to Amazon’s and many other large retailers’ approach. It can be achieved with quick login features, such as allowing them to log in with Google or offering a quick, no-password login. – Koby Ben-Meir, OwnID

12. Add A Countdown Timer To Show Orders Timing Out

Add a countdown timer to show when the order will run out on the checkout page to create a sense of urgency. If your customer thinks the supply is low or that the order could time out, it will help push them toward the finish line—especially if there is a visible reminder that time is running out near the “submit payment” button. – Victoria Zelefsky, The Menkiti Group

13. Incentivize A Purchase By Offering Something For Free

Never underestimate the power of offering something for free. Customers are often reluctant to hand over their hard-earned cash if there isn’t a guarantee. Using the sweetener “free” is always a good way to smooth over this friction, whether it’s through free shipping and returns or repeat-customer discounts. If the incentive is there, objections can be overcome, and conversions will increase accordingly. – Patrick Ward, Rootstrap

14. Don’t Use A Standard Template For The Checkout Page

So many times, e-commerce retailers just use a standard template for their checkout page, not realizing that this is the point of abandonment. Really take a look at your customer experience on this page. Do you need a few lines about your return policy right there to reassure them? How about the wording on your buttons? This is the final moment of decision, and it should really feel like your brand, not just a stock form. – Alexia Bregman, The Bureau Of Small Projects

15. Share How Many Items Are Left

There’s nothing that activates the fear of missing out more than knowing that there are only three or two items left and that if you don’t act soon, that number could easily go down to zero. – Melissa Kandel, little word studio