The ultimate goal of every business, including eCommerce, is to make profits. Therefore, as an eCommerce merchant, you need to constantly work on how to sell effectively and reduce card abandonment. Out of curiosity, questions like what is cart abandonment or how can I reduce cart abandonment may have popped into your mind. Well, you don’t need to rack your brain again because we are here to help.
What is Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment, in its simplest form, is when customers add a particular item to their shopping cart without completing the order. Therefore, if customers constantly leave the product in the cart without purchase, you lose a lot of money. And it would be best if you looked into this. This article will provide detailed information on why you are constantly experiencing cart and how to reduce cart abandonment effectively. Drive with us.
Common Cause of Cart Abandonment in eCommerce business
1. Additional Shipping Fee or Unexpected High Tax and Fee
Unknowingly to many eCommerce business owners, the main reason customers leave items in their cart is because of high shipping fees. Naturally, every online shopper is aware of a likely shipping fee. But when your shipping fee is equivalent to the price of the goods, it is a huge turn-off for the customer. Some customers go as far as just to add the item to their cart to know the total cost. However, if the shipping fee is too high or there is excessive tax attached, they will leave the item in their cart without attending to it.
2. Forced Account Creation
Good knowledge of machine learning enhances every e-commerce website. For example, personalized customer experience gives you access to specific information about your customers to meet and respond to their queries. No doubt, it helps to enhance sales and productivity.
Also, it is important to know that it discourages some online shoppers when they are forced to create an account. Most customers want to shop on your website without any form of delay. Most shoppers think creating an account takes a long process for which they don’t have the patience. Hence, they lose interest in the item which results in cart abandonment.
3. Slow Page Loading or Website Performance Issue
With the highly competitive rate of e-commerce businesses, having a slow page loading website will certainly make your e-commerce business run at a great loss. As we have established earlier, customers are generally impatient to spend minutes and hours on your slow-loading website.
Poor website performance, such as errors or crashes, will push your customer away. As a result of this, you are at the risk of losing not only customers but also referrals. Customers may even be discouraging others that website performance is bad.
4. Complicated, time-consuming checkout
Shoppers expect a straightforward payment gateway without any delay. A process whereby your website redirects the customer to several pages before a purchase gets them mentally stressed. And he or she abandons the product in the cart. An additional step, form, or process, such as a robot check, slows a customer from making a payment. Customer(s) may let go of the item.
5. Security Measures
Every activity over the internet is prone to cyber-attacks and internet fraud. Customers willing to trade or purchase items from a website want their personal bank information secured. If your e-commerce website doesn’t employ any security measures such as CAPTCHA, you won’t only lose the customer but also run into debt. Your websites should be able to process a secured payment method.
6. High Pricing Against Competitors
The price of items on your website determines the number of customers buying the product of their choice. So don’t be surprised customers run price sampling before deciding from which e-commerce website to buy for.
If the prices of your items are outrageous compared to your competitors, you will experience cart abandonment. No customer will purchase at a higher cost while provided with alternatives.
7. Lack of Payment Method
One major reason why people prefer e-commerce is to avoid staying in a queue for payment. Every customer wants to make payment in the comfort of their room.
The lesser the payment options you provide, the higher the chance of customers not buying. For instance, If your payment method only accepts MasterCard, how will customers with Visa, PayPal, or Verve make payment? This will leave the customer with no option but to leave the items.
Effect of Cart Abandonment on E-commerce Websites
From recent research, three factors drive customers to make purchasing decisions. The first is motivation. Motivation is the urge for a change mostly influenced by external factors like brand image, price, brand ambassador, and product review. This means the above factor moves the customer towards a brand or an item.
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The second factor is the trigger. This is an internal drive that propels you towards the brand or item. It could be a discount, the level of urgency, an advertisement, or even a free shipping fee for goods purchased. Your website should implore techniques to captivate and pull your customers to your brand.
Lastly, the third factor is ability. This combines the first two factors to ensure purchase from your target audience. It could be a smooth shipping process without much stress on the customer. However, the absence of any of these factors results in customers’ carts being abandoned.
This affects your e-commerce business(es) because you would lose customers, and experience low sales and stagnant goods. Imagine if a product or an item is on display for months. You have denied yourself restocking. Already, this is costing a huge amount of money.
How to Reduce High Rate of Cart Abandonment
1. Retargeting
In every marketing structure, there is a need to rebrand and retarget. This is to gear up old customers and prospective ones. As an e-commerce merchant, you need to uplift your marketing strategy to reduce high rates of cart abandonment.
How do you go about this? Send emails to your customers with juicy offers. Note, that the email should be as clean and simple as possible to achieve your intentions.
2. Progress Indicator
The function of the progress indicator is to get accurate data regarding your e-commerce website. It is an algorithm that provides you with the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your website. You should pay attention to high productivity. And to reduce cart abandonment.
3. Upfront Costing
This is another tip to prevent items from being abandoned in a customer’s cart. You should provide the necessary cost or feel for the item before shoppers add it to their cart. By doing so, customers who don’t mind the cost proceed to buy the item.
4. Guest CheckOut Offers
you can offer your shoppers a guest check out instead of forcing them to create an account, This is likened to a newsletter. However, this should pop up after a successful transaction. Any customer interested in getting updates on sales, products, and special offers will fill in their information willingly.
5. Bury Bad Review and Productions with High Abandonment.
This is also known as merchandising. It is a process of evaluating goods within search engines for specific business KPIs. For example, your website should use Al, that will display goods with the highest abandonment rate or poor reviews for proper optimization.
The Al will automatically boost products with high sales and inventory. On the other hand, it can bury and not display abandoned or items out of stock as top search results. However, both processes are only possible if you use the right product display platform (PDP).
Other ways to reduce cart abandonment include:
- Following PCI compliance guidelines to secure customers’ credit card information properly.
- Improve your website performance by watching out for its weaknesses and identifying errors.
- Your website should provide shoppers with a variety of payment options. Don’t limit them to a particular payment method.
Conclusion
This article has pricked your conscious mind to the reasons behind the high rate of cart abandonment by customers. It has also called your attention to its effect and various ways it can be controlled or stopped.
