If you are interested in learning how to reduce shopping cart abandonment, you’ve come to the right place with this shopping cart tutorial. First, let’s establish what exactly happens with shopping cart abandonment and how you can prevent this from occurring on your online store.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment:
Shopping cart abandonment occurs at an online store when the visitor will stock up items in his or her shopping cart, but will leave before completing the checkout process. Shopping cart abandonment indicates a loss of potential business, which is ultimately hurting your bottom line for profitability. For those businesses that start seeing a growing trend in the number of shopping carts being abandoned, this is a sign something is wrong with your business model and you are ultimately going to have to work harder to achieve your business goals and increase the success of your online store.
Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment:
There are a couple of different reasons why a consumer would abandon his or her shopping cart. Knowing these reasons can help address some of the issues that might exist with your business model so you can try and fix these to help reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment with your online store.
One of the top reasons a person would abandon his or her shopping cart prior to checkout is simply because they were doing some comparison shopping and ended up finding what they were looking for elsewhere most likely at a better price or for cheaper shipping. There is a reason why online shopping continues to become more and more popular, and a huge part of this is because shopping online provides consumers with ample opportunity to shop around, do research on the best products, read customer reviews and find the best pricing on the web. Along this same idea, part of the reason for shopping cart abandonment is that your visitors are likely able to find what they need elsewhere for cheaper or for a better deal somehow. If this happens enough, you should know that your prices might need to be reevaluated. Some reasons for shopping cart abandonment are simply based around the checkout itself. If your visitors don’t have enough time to fill out all of the necessary shipping and payment information or to create an account with your site, they might be more inclined to just forget it or find they won’t have enough time to complete the overall checkout process. This means you clearly are taking too much of your customers’ time and need to shorten the checkout process. There are a couple ways you can learn to do this.
Another reason your customers might leave before they have actually ordered from your store is because the product they want or need is out of stock or backordered. Even if they have other items in their cart, they are likely to just bag the idea altogether and will look at a different online shop where they can get all of the products they need. Customers might also get all the way into the shopping process before they realize it is not exactly what they were looking for. Unfortunately there isn’t always a way to prevent this from happening other than to make sure you have a variety of products and services to help meet the needs of all of your potential customers. Lastly, payment issues are a huge reason customers will leave their shopping carts hanging without finishing the process. If your online store does not accept certain types of credit cards, this is often cause for shopping cart dismissal.
How to Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment:
When it comes to preventing shopping cart abandonment, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, keep your pricing fair and competitive. While it is great to have as high of a profit margin as you can manage, it is not going to be effective if you keep prices too high. If your prices are far above the competition, you are going to less and less sales and will lost many customers through shopping cart abandonment as they do their comparison shopping. Next, it is also important to make sure and make the checkout process easy, quick and painless. Don’t make your customer complete five pages of information before they can check out. Make the checkout process a single page with a confirmation page to submit their order. Give the option to make the billing and shipping information the same so your customer doesn’t have to enter in the same information twice. It is also a good idea to make sure you have great payment gateway options and merchant account services using the best shopping cart solution for your website. This is a great to enhance the overall check out process if you select the top-ranked shopping cart provider online. There are so many shopping cart providers to choose from to help your reduce your shopping cart abandonment online. Make the checkout process easy and simple using all of the best shopping cart tools you can find from the best shopping cart providers.