If you own and run an eCommerce website, then you will be all too familiar with the disheartening feeling of seeing a potential customer abandon a full basket and checkout. The good news however, is that there are a number of things that you can try that will not only help to successfully minimise the number of ‘abandoned carts’, but also turn some of those website visitors around.
1. Offer free shipping
Offering your customers free shipping on your products is a very effective way to reduce the drop off rate. The fact is, websites that offer free shipping often have much higher conversion rates. And the best part? You can factor the cost of shipping in your product mark-up.
2. Allow guest checkout
Yes, the ideal goal is for every website visitor to sign up on your eCommerce store and become members, however, if you make it a requirement in order to purchase anything, you will lose business.
- Guest checkouts are faster.
- You can always ask customers to sign up later.
- It reduces shopping cart abandonment by a huge margin.
3. Offer more payment options
Roughly 10% of all abandoned carts are due to the eCommerce store not accommodating their preferred payment option.
Don’t worry, you don’t necessarily have to jump on the Crypto bandwagon, but it’s worth offering a little more variety. For example, not everyone uses PayPal or Stripe; some may prefer Wise or Apple Pay.
While it might feel unnecessarily complicated on your part having to offer so many different options, if it means a potential 10% more business, it’s definitely worth it.
4. Implement exit popups
Exit popups are essentially little windows that appear in the centre of the screen when a website visitor tries to abandon the website.
For example:
- “Sign up today and enjoy 15% off your first order!”
Some users that were committed to leaving your store and shopping with an alternative website might just have all the encouragement they need to stick around and spend their money with you!
5. Make the checkout process painless
You must offer your potential customers the path of least resistance and that means making the checkout process nice and easy.
For the best results you should consider split testing various checkout processes and seeing which has the highest conversion rates. You can then fine tune and dial in from there.
Oh! And don’t forget a progress indicator (a little bar at the top of the webpage indicating how far along a customer is in the checkout process).
6. Use social proof
The more trust signals you have on your website, the more likely your website visitors will be to sign up. Use your existing customers’ 5* reviews and satisfied comments to your advantage!
While not an eCommerce store, this agency that offers SEO services in Sydney has 500+ 5-star reviews and 100+ client case studies on their website, thus demonstrating to their prospective clients that they have plenty of proof in the pudding.
It works.
7. Improve your page load speed
Page load speed is arguably the most important point on this list.
- Aim for between 0 and 5-seconds (5-seconds max!)
- Conversion rates drop by 4.42% for every second waiting (between 0 and 5-seconds).
- 2-seconds for optimal conversions.
If you invest in a fast website and optimise for superior performance, you’ll have a much easier time of keeping those customers around long enough to check out with a full basket!