Cart abandonment is when someone adds products to a website’s shopping cart but leave it before making a purchase. It is one of the most common problems in e-commerce.
The worldwide average cart abandonment rate is 75.52%. This means 3 out of every 4 people abandon shopping carts before making a purchase costing e-marketers a lot of money.
The airline sector has the highest cart abandonment rate of 87.87%, followed by the travel and finance sector that has 81.31% and 77.97% respectively (please see below chart).
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A high cart abandonment rate indicates that the check out process needs some improvement. Unfortunately, it is impossible to bring down cart abandonment to 0%, you can still reduce and combat cart abandonment.
Let’s have a look at 5 tactics that can help you reduce cart abandonment and increase sales.
1 – Offer Money-Back Guarantee To Increase Trust
People spend money on sites they trust. People who are new to your website might hesitate on buying products unless there’s a money-back guarantee.
Imagine buying a $100 product from a website and finding it not as useful as you expected and the website you ordered from doesn’t provide return option. This is what scares online shoppers.
This is why big players such as Amazon and Flipkart offer a 10-30 day return/replacement option (given that the product is unused with tags intact).
Offering a no questions asked money-back guarantee will not only increase your conversion rate but it will also remove any potential hesitation a prospect might have about shopping from your website.
Even if you already have a no questions asked money-back guarantee policy, make sure it is visible in the products as well as the checkout page. Also, make strategies to avoid customers misusing your money-back guarantee.
You can also launch your own assured protection just like Flipkart and Amazon. Amazon mentions “100% purchase protection” while Flipkart mentions “Flipkart Assured” on select products to build trust with customers.
2 – Be Transparent About All Costs Especially Shipping
Hidden costs turn off shoppers quickly. Imagine people browsing through hundreds of products and finalizing a few of them expecting to pay one price. Later they find out the hidden costs such as tax, surcharges, and other outrageous shipping charges which inflates the actual purchase cost thereby increasing cart abandonments.
According to a Baymard Survey, 55% of customers abandon shopping carts because of the hidden extra costs associated with shipping. Have a look at the below chart that mentions the various reasons why people abandon a cart during checkout.
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Even if you don’t want to offer free shipping, don’t try to sneak shipping costs to the end of the transaction. It’s always better to be upfront about the end cost a customer will need to pay to get the product.
Another tactic you can use here is adding all the extra cost with the product price and use the tagline “No hidden costs” to boost sales. For example, if a product costs $79 and tax on the product is $7 plus $10 shipping charges, change the product price to $96.
3 – Tie Up With Local Delivery Services
Some shoppers need products immediately. If it won’t get delivered by the date they need it, they won’t buy it. You can offer express shipping facilities by tying up with local delivery services.
For example, if your business is in the UK, you can tie up with mail forwarding services like MyUKmailbox to allow customers to purchase items online, choose a UK delivery address (even if they don’t have one) and get the item delivered to their home.
Tying up with local delivery services can increase the delivery speed resulting in an increase in conversion rate. Another advantage of tying up with local delivery services is reduced overall shipping costs.
Make sure that the expected delivery date is visible on all pages. Don’t make your shoppers navigate back to the product page in order to find the estimated delivery timeline and calculate it themselves.
4 – Offer Guest Checkout Option
Forcing customers to create an account to make the purchase is one of the leading reasons for cart abandonment. In fact, a report from Invesp indicates 14% of shoppers abandon shopping carts because of no guest checkout option.
Though you will have to sacrifice the data that you get when a user creates an account in your store, it will ease the checkout process and decrease shopping cart abandonment rate.
Offering a guest checkout option will not only improve overall customer experience but it will also increase sales. Craving for user’s data to provide personalized recommendations is understandable but you shouldn’t make that a priority.
A great way to persuade people to create accounts on your site is by insisting your customers to create an account on your store by offering loyalty rewards or other incentives. In fact, this is what most of the big e-commerce retailers such as Walmart and Office Depot do.
5 – Provide A Live Chat Option
Shoppers might have questions about the product, payment or other technicalities (shipping, returns, refunds, etc.) or they might be looking for a better option before making a final decision.
Getting replies on the mail or social media takes too long resulting in cart abandonment. Live chat reduces the reply time, resulting in a decrease in cart abandonment.
In fact, a report published on LivePerson reveals that 51% of online shoppers are more likely to purchase from a website if they could clear all their doubts via live chat.
You can remove all the doubts a potential customer might have and improve customer experience and satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
Offering money-back guarantee not only increases conversion rate but it also helps in building trust with customers. Also, be upfront when it comes to shipping costs or other costs. Make sure users can order from your website without creating an account and tie-up with local delivery services to reduce delivery time. And last but not the least, providing a live chat option.
Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and author of SEOsandwitch.com. He is a regular contributor on publications like Wired, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Hubspot and several other sites.
Cart abandonment stock photo by Yesaulov Vadym/Shutterstock
