Reducing cart abandonment
Your marketing is going well and you’re attracting new potential customers, they like your site and can find what they want to buy – things are looking good. However many people abandon their shopping carts during checkout. Here are some of the reasons this might happen and what to do about it.
Checkout is confusing or too long
If there are too many steps, the checkout form is confusing or you ask for too much information people may give up. Not letting them know which fields are compulsory, clearing the page if there’s an error so they have to start again or other usability issues can frustrate people enough that they just close the site.
A clean checkout page with as few steps as possible along with sympathetic error messages can go a long way to improving abandonment due to usability reasons.
Making customers sign up
Some people don’t want to sign up for an account so consider letting them check out as a guest to improve the checkout rate. While it might be preferable for the business to get people to sign up for an account so you can market to them later, getting a guest sale is better than no sale!
Hidden postage costs
Going through checkout only to find that unexpected postage charges have been added can lead to cart abdonment. Be clear about postage charges early on in the sales process to avoid people getting a nasty surprise and closing your site. OpenCart allows postage to be shown at the cart stage which can help reduce this type of cart abdonment.
Checkout doesn’t look trustworthy
People are justifiably cautious of entering their card details to websites and having a trustworthy site and checkout process is vital. Consider using a recognisable payment gateway and offering PayPal as an option so that people see payment options they are familiar with.
Summary
While a number of people are just ‘window shopping’ and will always abandon their carts, there are some reasons potential customers might get turned off by the checkout process and there are ways of improving the checkout to reduce cart abdonment.
Our ecommerce websites have these points covered already, so give us a call on 01636 812551 if you need some help.