Ask an ecommerce retailer what their biggest day-to-day bugbear is, chances are they’ll say abandoned carts. There’s nothing more frustrating than strong traffic figures to your website, only for activity to trail off before a transaction is made. So why do so many consumers fail to complete a purchase?
It’s easy to take an abandoned purchase as a personal offence, but there are multiple reasons why consumers may not see it through. From the phone ringing mid order, to leaving the house and not wanting to transfer the purchase from a desktop to mobile device, life often gets in the way before shoppers hit the checkout button.
On the flip side, there are faults that lie at the retailer’s door, which could be impacting conversion rates. For example:
- Low quality imagery puts them off the product
- Poor product descriptions do not sufficiently address their queries
- Problems with inventory management lead to popular products being out of stock much of the time
- Slow loading websites grow too frustrating to wait for the item
- Laborious click throughs make the route to checkout too complicated
- Demanding sign up forms lead them to abandon the transaction before inputting their card details
- Transfer to an insecure or untrustworthy payment site makes them feel uneasy
- Last minute charges added at checkout push the price outside of their budget
In truth only 2% of consumers convert on their first visit to a website, but there are a number of strategies that retailers can employ to reduce abandoned purchases.
Make your products desirable
The better something looks online, and the more comprehensively it is described, the more likely people are to complete on a purchase. Don’t just advertise to consumers online; sell to them.
Create a straightforward user experience
Even the most seductive looking website will not convert sales if the navigation and route to purchase are overly complex. Your website should be designed to create a seamless customer journey, from the moment they land on the homepage until they confirm their purchase.
Think incentives, not obstruction
Instead of hiding fulfillment charges at the point of checkout to make a purchase seem cheaper, offer limited edition delivery promotions to make shoppers buy there and then. Fear of missing out is a great motivator!
Even if you can’t afford to offer free delivery on all items, clearly display fulfillment charges up front, and don’t be afraid to offer a free service on larger orders – often consumers are willing to add one more item to their basket, in order to tip them over that threshold.
Remarket to lost customers
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. There are two common ways to approach remarketing; the first concerns existing customers.
When a customer is logged into your site, you will have the analytics capabilities to see their exact activity. This enables you to view when items have been added to a basket but not checked out. Try sending them an email the next day, reminding them what they were browsing, and offering them a direct link through to your transaction page.
The other popular remarketing tactic uses cookies to monitor where consumers move around the Internet. When they click away to another site, you can send a retargeting ad showing an image of the last item they were browsing, to coax them back to your web page.