A Guide To Combating Abandoned Carts

Abandoned shopping carts are one of the biggest problems for online companies. While a user might have liked your brand and products enough to add a product into a basket, they could be deterred by the user experience, order total, or second thoughts about their wants and needs. As a result, they might click away from your site and never return. Continue reading →

Published by
Carol Trehearn

Abandoned shopping carts are one of the biggest problems for online companies. While a user might have liked your brand and products enough to add a product into a basket, they could be deterred by the user experience, order total, or second thoughts about their wants and needs. As a result, they might click away from your site and never return.

To grow your revenue and turn visitors into customers, read the below guide on how to combat abandoned carts.

Understand The Reasons For An Abandoned Cart

A high abandoned cart rate can be both confusing and frustrating for business owners. There are various reasons why a user might have failed to complete a purchase, which you must identify to secure more customers.

Common reasons for an abandoned cart could include:

  • Unexpected fees (such as shipping costs or taxes)
  • Complex navigation
  • Security concerns
  • Lengthy processes
  • Discovering a better price elsewhere

For this reason, you must aim to prevent worries from occurring, simplify the shopping experience, and avoid hidden extras to secure their custom. If you do plan extra fees for shipping, highlight the costs across your website to ensure a customer will factor in the price when adding items into their basket. If you fail to do so, the order total might not complement their budget, and they will be more likely to remove an item or click away from your site.

Build Trust In Your Brand

If a customer isn’t familiar with your brand and has never placed an order with your business before, they could worry about inputting their personal details and financial information. There are, however, actions you can take to build trust in your company.

Encourage visitors to trust your site by:

  • Investing in a valid SSL certificate
  • Adding trust symbols onto your site (such as PayPal Verified, Verified by Visa, and Verisign Secured)
  • Creating an attractive, easy-to-use website
  • Publishing high-quality thought leadership content
  • Displaying testimonials and customer reviews

Send Cart Abandonment Emails

You will likely capture a visitor’s email when they embark on the checkout process. If they fail to complete a purchase, you could send an autoresponder email to inform them their items are waiting in their cart.

While you shouldn’t inundate a visitor with messages, send one or two emails within 24 hours to encourage them to return to your site and finish an order. You must, however, learn how to create an engaging email marketing campaign that will not end up in their trash folder.

Launch A Remarketing Campaign

Remarketing campaigns can be a powerful tactic for encouraging past visitors to return to a site and complete an order. The advertisements can appear across social media, apps, or the Google Ad network to specifically reach a previous visitor using cookies. It will feature products they have viewed in the past in an attempt to re-engage with them and secure their custom.

Add A Guest Checkout Option

Many online shoppers don’t want to create an account and enter many personal details into a website. To improve the user experience and simplify the buying process, provide visitors with a guest checkout option. Once they have placed an order, a customer might be happy to add their information to place future orders on your website.

Feature Impartial Reviews To Convince Customers

Impartial reviews can remove any doubt about the quality of a product or service. To convince a customer that your product is worthy of their time and money, you should:

  • Incorporate genuine reviews and testimonials on your product pages
  • Feature reviews on your Facebook profile
  • Add a backlink to a review website, such as TripAdvisor or Glassdoor
  • Feature an app such as Notify on your online store to prove others are buying your products

Simplify Your Navigation

Visitors don’t want to enter many forms and click through many pages to make a purchase. As mentioned earlier, complex navigation could lead to potential customers abandoning their carts. Prevent customers from clicking away by reducing the number of clicks to three.

Simplified navigation should look like this:

  1. Pick a product
  2. Add an item into a shopping cart
  3. Hit the checkout button

Reduce the time it takes from a product page to the basket and offer limited forms to fill for a fast buying process and a greater user experience. It could make a big difference to your yearly revenue and profit margin.

Incorporate A Progress Indicator

Increase a visitor’s patience by incorporating a progress indicator into the checkout process. It will show your customers where they are in the checkout and how many steps that they must take to complete an order. It will assure a customer that they won’t have many actions to take until they have bought a product, so they can quickly return to their day.

A progress indicator should have minimal steps to complete, which could prevent a prospective buyer from abandoning their site, such as:

  • Access Checkout
  • Billing
  • Shipping Details
  • Payment
  • Order Confirmation

You also could optimize the checkout experience by using A/B testing of a progress indicator. Remember, what works on one company’s site won’t necessarily work on your own, so test different options to find a sign that matches your web users’ online behavior and the company’s needs.

Use Visuals To Increase Buyer Confidence

Customers might have second thoughts about your products at the checkout, as they can’t hold an item in their hand to review its quality. Visuals can, however, convince them to make a purchase, as they will have a greater understanding of a product and how it could match their needs.

For example, you could add high-resolution product photographs from various angles. You also should add images that show visitors how they can use an item, and that highlights its many benefits.

So, if you want to lower your abandoned cart rate and maximize sales in 2020, you should consider the above advice. It could lead to a more significant customer base, an improved user experience, and a more substantial annual revenue.

A Guide To Combating Abandoned Carts was last updated July 19th, 2021 by Carol Trehearn
A Guide To Combating Abandoned Carts was last modified: July 19th, 2021 by Carol Trehearn
Carol Trehearn

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