Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment

Reducing shopping cart abandonment is a key method to improving your online sales through your ecommerce site. In fact, some research shows that up to 75% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before making a purchase. This can have a devastating effect on your profitability.

To help overcome this phenomenon, we are going to offer our top tips to tackling the issue. We will show you the primary reasons for shopping cart abandonment and provide solutions to reducing the occurrence.

These tips will help you even if your site is not built with WordPress. However, we will also highlight some tools and plugins that are specific to WordPress. First, let’s define shopping cart abandonment.

What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

The name basically defines itself. A visitor puts items into the digital shopping cart on your ecommerce site, then leaves the site without completing the purchase. This can happen on the shop page, during checkout or at any other stage of the customer journey. The percentage of people who do this on your site is the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Reasons

There are many reasons why anyone would not go through with their purchase, not all of which you can influence.
For example, website speed has a huge impact on your abandonment rates. It can result in a 75% increase in abandonments. At the same time, over 80% of customers who don’t end up buying from you are actually just window shopping and doing research. Only 2-3 percent of customers complete a purchase on their first visit.

These are the primary reasons why people don’t convert more easily:

• Expensive fees like shipping, taxes, etc. (55%)
• Necessity to create an account to complete the purchase (34%)
• Checkout process too long or complicated (26%)
• Didn’t trust the site with credit card information (17%)
• Website exhibited errors/crashed (17%)
• Payment options not sufficient (6%)

There are two things you should take away from this:

• Cart abandonment happens everyday, and you need to accept it as part of running an online store.
• You can take actions to reduce shopping cart abandonment on your site.

How to Fix Cart Abandonment

You will find a number of cart abandonment solutions you can use to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Let’s start with some basic technical measures.

Increase Site Speed

As seen above, slow loading times have a huge impact on cart abandonment rates. For that reason, one of the most high-impact actions you can take is to make sure your site loads as quickly as possible.
This is just part and parcel of having a website these days. Google has found that longer loading times greatly increase bounce rate on mobile.
In addition, Amazon reported that an extra second in page loading time could cost them billions in sales. Therefore, having a fast site is one of the pillars in your quest to reduce cart abandonment rates.

Improve Your Checkout Process

Most of the time, the first step to take is to simplify the checkout process.

Here are some measures to do that:

• Use a one-step checkout — Implement all the steps needed to check out in once page. If you can’t condense that much, see if you can reduce the number of steps or just simplify the form or other elements to make things more streamlined.
• Enable guest checkout — As we have seen above, being forced to open yet another account is a reason for many not to go through with their purchase. Allowing to shop as a guest does away with that hurdle. WooCommerce has this feature out of the box.
• Eliminate clicks — Generally, see where you can reduce the actions that someone needs to take to buy from your store. For example, users shouldn’t be taken to their shopping cart automatically after adding an item. Going back is just one more click they need to make.

We are going to offer some additional practical tips for improving your conversion rates in our next blog post. Check back next week and increase your sales and profitability.