As a business, there are a few things which are as disappointing as a customer who starts to purchase services or items, get all the way to the checkout, and then abandons their shopping cart and walks away. It’s a sign of an issue at some part of the process and it is infuriating.
So, how do you reduce cart abandonment? What do you need to do to make sure that customers successfully complete their order, and don’t just ditch the shopping cart at the last minute? It’s tricky, but if you’re clever about it, it is possible to improve the customer experience to the point that these abandonments don’t happen.
Targeted Marketing
At the pinnacle of the purchase, the point where customers are about to walk away from their orders, bringing in targeted marketing can be a good way to keep their focus. Specifically, what you’re trying to accomplish here is convincing them to invest in completing their purchase. It could be a promotion down on social media, it could be a clever trick with SCO, but the important part of the exercise is to convince people that they should carry on with their purchase.
Cut Download Times
Perhaps one of the biggest problems that a business will face when trying to prevent cart abandonment is the problem of load times for pages.
If the checkout page takes too long, customers start to rethink their purchases. They question whether these purchases are the right choices and this leads to them not wanting to buy from you. They abandon their carts and move on, which means you don’t get their business.
To remedy this, try and cut down on the amount of time that the pages take to load. This may involve simplifying the process, this may involve diverting more resources to the page, but whatever you do, it needs to be sharp and quick.
Be Clear About Extra Costs
If you are going to really entice people to continue a purchase and check out their goods, you might want to think about being clear about the extra costs associated with their order from the start. Some people have a hidden service charge, sometimes there are shipping costs, and these can all mislead people and upset them.
It is far more sensible to make sure that you have instead simply been honest about the kind of extra costs that a customer can expect to encounter ahead of time. You want to make sure that you are specifying these charges ahead of time because this helps with transparency, integrity and honesty.
Overall, these are just some of the different things that you can do to make sure that your shopping carts are not abandoned. It is a terrible thing for any business to get that far ahead and then to have them fail, which is why you need to make sure that you have tried to prevent this. You need to engage and entice the customer, and make them feel like they can work with you if they need to.
