Shopping cart abandonment continues to be a huge problem for online retailers.
Although it doesn’t directly cut into your bottom line, these virtual window shoppers are still potential leads that may be looking at your shop and then choosing to buy with a competitor, which means wasted marketing dollars.
Instead of sighing and thinking of these people as the ones that got away, you can do more to connect to your more fickle shoppers and even avoid abandonment all together.
These three tips can be complete game changers:
- Refine your checkout process. So many retailers continue to wonder why their shopping cart abandon rate is so high, but never bother to look at their checkout process. It may be that it’s just too frustrating or challenging to buy from you, which encourages customers to abandon their carts.Hiding things like shipping rates or not providing a few different shipping options for visitors can encourage them to turn tail and run away. This is why customer web portals and transparent order fulfillment are both so vital. The less hassle a shopper experiences and the more they know about their transaction right out of the gate, the better the chances are that they’ll complete their transactions.
- Retarget to encourage follow-through. Letting your visitors leave their carts sit abandoned might seem like your only option, but hardly the end. Emails retargeting those potential customers, perhaps offering a discount or simply reminding them that your store still exists, are highly effective tools in the battle against shopping cart abandonment.Design your email templates well in advance and program your shopping cart system to send them out at set intervals for the best success with retargeting. Welcome emails are also a great tool for bringing new customers back for more.
- Offer omnichannel. Believe it or not, the reason your customers won’t come back to their shopping carts may be something as simple as not being able to access them on all their devices. Many of today’s shoppers research products on their mobile devices before ultimately buying them on a desktop computer.Allowing them to move easily between devices and providing robust platforms for each devices in use makes shopping easier and often more successful.
With an average of 68.81 percent of shopping carts being abandoned at any given time, it’s vital that you invest in a strategy that better speaks to those shoppers. By remaining transparent, making it easy to buy from your store, retargeting and giving customers ways to access their cart from multiple devices, you’ll find that more lookers become buyers and your marketing dollars go a lot further.
Take your time when you examine your own system and walk through it step-by-step to find the flaws that are scaring your shoppers away.
