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Shopping Cart Abandonment Tips: How to Improve eCommerce Sales

How to improve conversion rates by reducing shopping cart abandonment

You’re putting a great effort into getting customers on to your eCommerce store. Once there your great UI/UX and crafty conversion optimisation techniques are converting customers well. Where else can you optimise the process?

One way is by dealing with shopping cart abandonment. In this article I’ll discuss some of the ways to regain those ‘lost’ conversions in general and specifically with regards to Magento websites.

Reduce the Amount of Shopping Cart Abandonment

The first steps are to look at any barriers to purchase and start taking steps to keep the customer engaged with your buying process. You want to make it as easy, as pain-free as possible to buy from you instead of a competitor.

Quite often Amazon is a leader in this field – think about the persistent log-in, your card details saved and ready to go (this requires top-notch security, of course), free delivery offers & many more big and little concepts in-between, some of which I’m sure you’ll recognise in the following section.

Shipping Prices

Keep these upfront to avoid a nasty shock and make sure any free delivery incentives are very, very clear to the customer. Think ‘Free Delivery’ roundels if the offer is specific products only, or a ‘countdown’ system if there is a free delivery spend threshold.

Helpful Returns Policy

I know you don’t want to encourage returns, but by keeping your policy at hand on product pages you can show potential customers that any issues will be easy to resolve. This reduces the worry that they might be buying the wrong product.

It may not be that visibly linked on product pages, but the ASOS returns policy page itself is very well done. They re-assure you with multiple options for returns, the vast majority of which have a pleasantly reassuring ‘FREE’ in bold before describing all the times and locations you can make use of.

Add Social Proof

Having real customer reviews to hand by each product adds a degree of social proof, helping to reinforce the idea that this product from this site is the one for them.

Take a look at Amazon for a good example of this one. The reviews are right under the product name. A very clear star rating, with the number of reviews right next to it so your customers know that a 4 star rating isn’t a fluke when it’s made up of 200 reviews. Right underneath that for some products you might see a ‘#1 Best Seller’ badge. More proof that people love this product.

Use One-Page Checkout

You may be tempted to get more and more details to create demographics for further marketing but don’t let that get in the way of a sale. Collect the bare minimum details – name, billing address, delivery address, payment details and add optional contact details for coordinating the delivery.

Quick tip – let them easily select the delivery address to be the same as the billing address to save filling it out again.

Don’t Force Sign-Up

Someone who has narrowly decided to buy from you could be put off by an onerous, multi-page sign-up process. Allow checkout as guest, but remember to give them a simple checkbox option to become a member (or send a follow up email with a link to a form that prefills with the relevant data you already have from them).

Get some of the Abandoned People Back on Board

With regards to Magento, with the right extension and the right approach you can recapture some of these abandoned carts. Whether they were in the research phase and forgot about you or simply got cold feet, a timely email with the right offer (perhaps free shipping if that’s normally a sticking point for your customers) can do wonders to get them back on site and headed towards the checkout.

Some of our eCommerce clients derive sizeable portions of their sales from this process. Sales that would otherwise never happen, so it’s definitely worth exploring.

So what are the extension options? There are several, ranging from ones that focus solely on abandoned carts to full-blown marketing solutions. It’s worth checking out Abandoned Carts Alert Pro, Abandoned Cart Reminders or Abandoned Cart Email by Amasty.

I hope this post has helped and that you’ll soon be on your way to improved sales.

The post “Shopping Cart Abandonment Tips: How to Improve Sales” was written by Owen, online marketing manager at Elementary Digital, a Leeds and London based digital agency specialising in WordPress and Magento websites.

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