How to stop shopping cart abandonment in Shopify
On average, 67.45% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes their order. That means you are losing a good number of potential sales every day!
Of course, it’s unlikely you will be able to persuade every single customer to come back and complete the sales – about 40% of the abandoned carts were used by people who never had any intention to purchase, and they were just browsing your page. But if you could manage to convince a portion of the customers who got distracted or upset with your website to finish the shopping, your revenue would surely get a boost!
Here are some tips how can you persuade those customers to return:
1. Add an “exit-intent” popups
Have you ever used an exit-intent popup? If used correctly, they can have a massive impact on your conversions. How does it work? A plugin tracks the activity of the site visitor, and when it detects the visitor is about to leave the site, it then sends a popup message that encourages the visitor longer by presenting them a special offer or give more information.
While it doesn’t work every single time (and might actually turn off some visitors instead of persuading them), they are a great solution when it comes to fighting with cart abandonment issues. When someone is just about to abandon their shopping cart, you can try to convince them with a discount coupon or ask do they wish to save their shopping cart for later.
2. Allow for guest checkout
Unless you sell one of a kind product, customers won’t be interested in creating an account before they even make the first purchase.
Preventing a customer from purchasing by forcing him to make an account will only end in customer turning away and looking for a page where they don’t have to create an account just to order one thing. To make the purchase easier and faster for your customers, give them an option of a guest checkout, without creating an account.
You can ask them to register after they made a purchase, for example by saying that by creating an account, their customer data will be saved for later purchases.
3. Offer a Variety of Payment Options
Even if a customer wants to buy from your store, he might be discouraged by the lack of payment options. With so many payment options available right now, offering only credit cards and bank transfer is out of the question.
56% of online shoppers want to see a variety of payment options at checkout – so offering only one or two payment options can severely reduce your sales. Besides credit cards and bank transfers, you should also provide Paypal payment (especially for international customers) and mobile payments (such as Google pay or Android Pay)
4. Offer Free Shipping
Shipping costs are the #1 reason that shoppers abandon their carts – if the shipping cost is not much cheaper than the product itself and the order is actually more expensive online than if bought in a mall, what’s the point? People want to save money by shopping online, not lose it.
One of the best things you can do to convince your customers to finish shopping is to offer free shipping. 60% of e-commerce stores say free shipping (with set conditions, of course) is one of their most successful marketing tools. Why with set conditions? Offering free shipping for any orders, unconditionally is a good idea for a day or two but not for longer.
Setting certain conditions that a customer must satisfy in order to qualify for a shipping (most popular option is free shipping when the order is of a fixed minimum value, but you can also offer free shipping for your most expensive products) is a much better option – not only it entices customers to buy the more expensive products, many of them will also make a bigger order just to qualify for a free shipping!
5. Make your page load faster
Customers do not have the time or patience to wait for the page to load nowadays. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. What is more, according to Visual Website Optimizer, e-commerce shopping cart conversion rates drop 7% for every one-second delay in your page loading and 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again.
To speed up your website (and increase your conversions), start with optimising the images on your site – reducing the size of your images can drastically improve your website load time! Reducing the number of plugins on your website will also make your website load faster and easier.
6. Retarget your customers with cart recovery emails
Abandoned cart emails are an incredibly powerful though underused tactic to get customers to complete their purchase. In short, cart recovery emails are triggered emails sent to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but didn’t finish their purchase. A good cart recovery email send at the right time can work wonders – nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third convince customers to finish the purchase.
The best thing is that these emails can be scheduled and sent automatically using various tools and plugins – when the system detects an abandonment cart, it automatically sends an email to the customer with their cart contents, notices about the items being soon out of stock or a discount coupon. No need to send every single email manually!
7. Optimise your mobile website too!
Since customers are getting more and more comfortable with spending money using mobile websites instead of regular desktop ones, giving them a way to use your site on smartphones and tablets is crucial for success. 93% of people who use their mobile device to look for a product will make a purchase – if your website will allow them to complete the purchase.
If the page doesn’t load or it loads too slowly if the pictures are too small or too big to load correctly, if your customers can’t read the product details, can’t find their cart or have problems with getting through checkout while on a smartphone, they won’t finish their purchase.
By having a responsive mobile website not only you will be able to get mobile users to complete their purchase but also have more website traffic, more customers and better website ranks – and that’s your aim right?
Source: Quora
