The vast majority of online shopping carts are abandoned either before or during checkout. There are a variety of reasons why online shoppers abandon their shopping carts, with most of those related to the performance or design of the website.
It’s crucial that ecommerce businesses keep working on improving their website and their overall checkout process. Here are five different ways you can improve your online’s store’s conversion rate.
Add trust signals to your website
Over 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned due to a lack of trust, which results in an annual loss of $1.9 billion in sales. Adding trust signals to your website can help customers feel more confident about buying from your online store. The four main types of trust signals you can add to your website are:
Social proof - Trust signals such as product reviews and testimonials constitute social proof and can be very helpful in getting customers to trust your business. Most ecommerce businesses place social signals on their product pages, but you can also display them on your homepage.
Guarantees - An unconditional money-back guarantee can do wonders for gaining your customers’ trust. Other common trust signals in this category include payment method logos such as Visa and MasterCard logos, a PayPal banner, etc.
Membership - Another way to gain customers’ trust is by showing them that your business is a member of a reputable organization such as the Better Business Bureau.
Association - Similar to signals of membership, association signals can make your customers feel more confident about purchasing from your business by showing them that you’re working with other reputable businesses such as famous brands or media outlets.
Offer multiple payment options
50% of online shoppers state that they abandon their shopping cart if their preferred payment method isn’t available. To avoid this, try offering multiple payment options on your checkout page.
Some estimates show that non-card payments will be responsible for 55% of all ecommerce payments by 2019, so you should consider adding payment options such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay to your online store.
Digital wallets such as the three mentioned above can also help to significantly speed up your checkout process by pre-filling customers’ billing and shipping information. By doing this, they save customers from having to manually enter their credit card and shipping information every time they want to make a purchase. We have detailed other ways you can improve your checkout process in our next tip.
Improve your checkout
28% of shoppers who abandon their shopping carts state that the main reason why they leave an online store without making a purchase is the store’s time-consuming or complicated checkout process. It’s clear that the checkout process is a crucial part of the conversion funnel and it’s very important to do as much as you can to improve it. Here are some tips to help you do this:
Allow guest checkout
37% of shoppers state that they abandon checkout if they need to create an account to complete their purchase. To prevent this from happening, make sure to allow your customers to check out without creating an account.
Get rid of navigation on checkout pages
To prevent customers from abandoning checkout without making a purchase, remove all navigation links from your checkout page.
Simplify checkout forms
To help customers complete checkout faster, simplify checkout forms to require the minimum amount of information possible. Remove unnecessary fields such as the salutation field and allow customers to use their billing address as the shipping address in one click.
Use abandoned cart emails
According to 40 different studies examined by the Baymard Institute, the average rate of shopping cart abandonment is 69.89%. The most frequent complaints made by shoppers who abandon their shopping carts include:
- The need to create an account
- Additional costs (e.g., shipping, sales tax)
- Complicated checkout process
The best way to regain some of these abandoned carts is to send out abandoned cart emails. These are emails that are automatically sent to customers when they leave your website without making a purchase.
Abandoned cart emails are very effective in regaining sales, with 10.7% of them resulting in a sale. Out of all abandoned cart email campaigns, the most effective ones are those that consist of a series of three or more emails. These campaigns drive 69% more orders than campaigns that consist of a single email. DataCue can help you send personalized abandoned cart emails to your customers with ease.
To get your abandoned cart emails to drive even more sales, you can experiment with using them to offer an additional discount to your customers. A time-limited discount can be especially effective in helping customers decide to complete their purchase.
Timing is another thing that you need to consider when planning out your abandoned cart email campaigns. You should send the first reminder email as soon as possible, while your product is still on your customers’ mind. If that doesn’t work, consider sending a couple more emails over the following 48 hours. A schedule like this is a good starting point, but you’ll need to test and see what works best for you.
Optimize for mobile devices
People did 34.5% of all online shopping in 2017 on mobile devices. Some estimates predict that this number will rise to 54% by 2021. You need to make sure that your online store looks and works flawlessly on mobile devices if you want to capture as many mobile sales as possible.
Use a responsive, mobile-optimized design for your online store. Try visiting your website from a wide range of different mobile devices and browsers to make sure that all elements of your website are displayed correctly and that your checkout works without issues.
Conclusion
To sustain the growth of your business, you need to be working on improving your website’s conversion rate constantly. Use our tips as a starting point for improving your website but remember that every business is different. What works for one store might not work for another. Keep testing different variations of your homepage, product page, and checkout pages to find the ones that convert the best.
