As the owner of an e-tail store, you might initially imagine that a prospective customer of yours would surely only abandon their shopping cart for certain narrow and very specific reasons. Perhaps they suddenly realise that the price of the item is more than they’re prepared to pay? Or maybe they were never even that serious about buying the product anyway, and just changed their mind.
Alas, there are also certain aspects of your ecommerce store’s structure and content that could be fuelling high cart abandonment rates.
After all, the moment a customer places an item in their shopping cart, your mission as a store is to get them to complete their purchase as swiftly and easily as possible. If you seem to be struggling to get some of your customers ‘over the line’, it’s therefore worth asking whether they might be getting distracted by the following factors.
Lots of unnecessary fields on the checkout page
It might seem like obvious advice to suggest that your online store’s checkout pages need to be simple and streamlined to move customers quickly towards that ‘pay now’ button… but a lot of real-world checkout pages still get this wrong.
The way some stores incorporate voucher codes and gift cards can be a particular ‘offender’. Some such pages display empty text boxes that practically beg the customer to enter something. This, in turn, may cause the customer to open up a new browser tab and start looking online for discount codes they could potentially use for the item they’re buying.
That’s the kind of customer distraction you don’t need. Instead, as the discount code field is hardly an essential field, you might consider hiding yours behind a link. This way, if the customer is focused on simply buying the product, that’s what they will do.
Unnecessary pages between the cart and the checkout
It seems almost crazy now, but there was a time when online stores would often insert a page between the cart and the checkout page, displaying relevant limited-time offers.
Even worse, online store owners would then frequently measure the performance of this page solely on the basis of how many shoppers took up the offer, perhaps not even considering that it could increase cart abandonment.
So, if there’s one lesson we want you to take from this, it’s to display any accessories or other related items on the product page, or at least somewhere else they won’t distract or even deter your customer from completing their purchase.
Other unimportant messaging before the customer has bought the product
You might be rightly proud of the fact that a certain percentage of every purchase from your store goes to charity. However, you shouldn’t be so proud of it that you literally interrupt the checkout process to explain it to the customer.
In any case, there are plenty of other places on your store’s website where something like this could be discussed… on its own separate page, perhaps, or below the ‘final purchase’ button. You could even mention it on your invoices or confirmation emails.
Of course, it’s basically impossible for a store to close every single possible sale. However, there will almost certainly be things you can do to reduce your store’s current cart abandonment rates. For more information and advice about our ecommerce website design services at Piranha Designs, simply get in touch with us now in Gibraltar, London, Edinburgh or Spain.
