Improving your Cart Conversion Rate

Online retailers searching for low investment solutions to their high cart abandonment rates should look to implement Conversion Rate Optimisation methods that can provide quick ROI improvements.

Cart abandonment rate is a key business metric that retailers should routinely observe, as a high cart abandonment rate can strongly impact customer conversion rates and overall business revenue if it’s not addressed and optimised correctly.

A high cart abandonment rate is a common indicator of friction in store’s checkout process or user experience. The positive of possessing a high cart abandon rate is that it’s relatively straightforward to identify the issue within the marketing funnel. This can also provide positive suggestions to finding actionable quick fixes.

Businesses often need assistance identifying common reasons for shoppers abandoning a cart. A thorough optimisation would likely require A/B Testing in order to narrow down what practices work best for a website’s experience, but there are lots of key reasons as to why shoppers can’t commit to a sale.

Consider the following conversion rate optimisation tips to reduce your cart abandonment.

Start Calculating your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Here’s how to calculate shopping cart abandonment rate. Compare the number of purchases to the number of filled shopping carts.

For example, one purchase for every three filled shopping carts equals an abandonment rate of 67% (around the average).

Start calculating your own rates so your store has a useful business metric to gauge improvement.

👉🏼What does a good Conversion Rate look like? 👈🏼

Don’t Let Hidden Fees Cost you a Sale

Consumers may arrive at your eCommerce store after finding a promotion online or clicking through to your shop via paid ads.

As we often see with eCommerce retailers, sometimes consumers can only view the shipping, taxes, handling and any extra costs after items have added to their cart for viewing. To a consumer, this can feel like a cheap trick, and are unlikely to return to the ‘offending’ store.

Try offering free or cheaper shipping costs with minimum orders. This promotes both transparency and encourages customers to make larger orders.

Offer More Payment Methods

It’s correct to assume that not every one of your customers will want to pay with Paypal, or maybe a Credit Card instead, but rather a digital wallet, debit, or even a checking account draft.

Now more than ever, we see lots of ecommerce stores integrating the likes of Klarna, a flexible payment instalments option, into their checkout process.

Since consumer circumstance is more unpredictable than ever, it might be wise to offer handy services like this – collating and understanding consumer behaviour is absolutely crucial in 2021.

Don’t punish those wishing to purchase via alternate methods by charging fees because it will alienate your brand and customer base.

Streamline the Checkout Experience with Autofill

Perhaps an overlooked part of a checkout process that can be optimised to increase your conversions; stores without an autofill form is a point of frustration in user checkout experiences because of the time required to fill out shipping and billing information.

24% said they would be likely to abandon a purchase because the brand or retailer’s website didn’t remember them.*

Implementing Autofill is a proven way to improve this process. It may only save shoppers a few seconds, it can have a significant impact on conversion rate.

The time elapsed over a checkout journey can be precious, a few seconds might be the difference in earning or indeed costing businesses thousands more in annual sales.

Pop-Ups and Away

Integrating an exit pop-up enables unconvinced consumers to submit information regarding why they didn’t commit to purchasing items from your store.

It’s also a great promotional tool, capable of offering promotional discounts on costs like shipping, item prices, etc.

Follow-Up with Emails

A last-gasp form of communication with consumers who abandoned their shopping cart. Emails can aid in the recovery of their abandoned carts, especially by offering discount codes upon their return to your store.

These emails can also be used to gather key insights into why the aforementioned carts were abandoned in the first place.

Inspire Customer Confidence in your Brand

If they’re at your disposal, leveraging testimonials from satisfied customers, third-party reviews, press cuttings, and even ratings from business sites like the BBB & Trustpilot can help drive shoppers to make a purchase.

If your social media pages are brimming with positive reviews and rich customer engagements, promote them! Proof of positive social media interactions will help build trust between your brand and new shoppers.

Refund & Return Policies, item prices, shipping costs, and data policies should all be clear, concise and easily accessible; building trust is essential to inspiring checkout confidence so leave no stone unturned.

Security is Paramount

Be transparent when it comes to communicating your business’ privacy protection and data use policies. Include any security and compliance logos that are integrated into your store in the user journey.

75% (of shoppers) said they would be likely to abandon their shopping cart if they did not trust the website’s security.*

First-time customers in particular will be looking for forms of verification that your business can be trusted to protect their privacy and personal data.

Consider Consumer Demographics

Is your eCommerce store targeting a younger audience with its product? Then it’s important to consider that Gen-Z shoppers are significantly more easily distracted than their seniors.

A fifth (19%) of 16-to-24-year-olds admitted to abandoning items already in their online shopping cart once a week, whilst 30% do so even more frequently. In comparison, that’s nearly double the number of 45-to-54-year-olds making the same claim (12% and 11%, respectively).

The most common reasons amongst this age group for abandoning purchases include:

• Too expensive or too slow delivery options – 60%

• Frustration with a poor mobile website experience – 37%

• Mandatory account creation – 34%

• Forgetting existing account log in details – 29%

• Being distracted by a text or social media notification – 29%.

Every customer demographic is important. Brands and retailers should pay particular care and attention to this generation’s consumer behaviour to future proof their business.

Conclusion

If cart abandonment optimisation is your biggest priority, then take pride in the fact that customers have ventured quite far in the journey your website outlined despite its potential flaws.

By isolating conversion rate optimisation issues at the shopping cart stage, it provides an ideal opportunity to earn quick gains in the sales process.

Making even the smallest changes to your checkout process could significantly improve your cart conversion rate.

This can fundamentally result in a better online shopping experience (and enhancing your brand reputation); it can reduce bounce rates and pogo-sticking. It can even improve your profile in SERP.

At Sherwen Studios, our consultancy services are designed to help clients identify what could be causing slow website loading times.

Once we've identified why your website is performing slowly, we can make recommendations that could have immediate improvements on your loading speeds.

To find out more about how we can help you improve your website performance, please contact us.

*These findings are based on a survey of 2,000 UK shoppers, commissioned by Censuswide. The survey ran from 20th-25th March 2020.