This article emphasises on the areas to consider for decreasing the cart abandonment rates of eCommerce stores and increase conversions.
Think of a situation where, you have completed browsing through an online store, added to selected products to shopping cart, however, repeatedly failed to make the final payment. This phenomenon is what we called as cart abandonment, which is faced by many online merchants because of improper store infrastructure.
Cart abandonment can happen because of dozens of reasons including: customers getting distracted, getting disappointed because of poor service or unexpected fees or they visit the store just for window shopping. Moreover, they can expect some more personalised offers and communication for a highly lucrative shopping experience. Having these in mind, here we would like to pinpoint the various reasons and effective ways of decreasing the cart abandonment rate of online stores.
Smart Techniques of Optimising Cart Abandonment Revenue Opportunity
Some of the beneficial ways of decreasing the abandonment rates are:
- Optimise Your Offers: Include free shipping, faster deliveries and convenient process for returns.
- Optimise the User Experience: Keep the entire thing simple and clear.
- Optimise the Engagement: Adjust the communication process on-site and communicate individually with the customers before they leave your online store.
- Optimise the Evaluation Process: Include effective business metrics to test and measure the performance thoroughly.
Following here we would like to elaborate on each of the points discussed.
Optimising Offers
Add a range of special perks which, will drive the customers to shop.
- Allow people to choose from a range of payment options including: on delivery, PayPal, credit card and other types of local payment processes. Furthermore, include different types of security information, protocols and badges.
- Offer gift options at time of checkout.
- Offer product bundles at discounted prices.
Optimising User Experience
Being an online merchant, you must look for ways to simplify the steps involved in driving the customers for completing the entire transaction seamlessly.
- It is important not to make the registration process too lengthy. Try to make it simple by asking the customers to provide only the relevant information. This, in turn, will help you to reduce the abandonment rate, thereby resulting in increased conversions.
- Develop an easy-to-modify online shopping cart such that you can effortlessly remove or add items and adjust the quantities.
- Develop an eye-catching and crystal clear layout for ‘buy’ and ‘shop now buttons.
Optimising Engagement
Take initiative to reach out all the customers on site and even after they leave your store.
- Prepare effective remarketing ads, by which, you can connect with the past visitors or customers by either suggesting them products as per their preference or showing them latest arrivals.
- Make use of email automation which, will help in recovering the cart abandoners and turn them into final customers.
- Add product bundles and recommendations such as last-seen items and complementary products to the shopping cart page to increase their amount of purchases.
Optimising the Evaluation Process
- Measure the rate of cart abandonment by using Google Analytics tracking.
- Increase the rates by using different effective techniques such as heat mapping and A/B testing.
Final word
Cart abandonment is one of the most common yet crucial issues dealt by eCommerce merchants in the course of their business. Thus, having the above-mentioned aspects in mind and working on them will surely help them to widen the customer base, increase conversions and attain long-term success.
Jonathan Paul is a senior professional of PHPProgrammers, a premier company specialised in offering top-notch Magento web development services that has rich industrial experience in developing feature-laden applications.