There is an old poem that goes “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” In the world of eCommerce, we can use some creative license to re-imagine this line as “cart and revenue abandonment everywhere but not a sale to recover.”
Aside from the fact that the line is factually incorrect, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Cart-Abandonment is the bane of eCommerce Merchants the world over, and because of that, the Datacrushers Revenue Discovery platform exists – to help eCommerce merchants combat cart-abandonment, and recover revenue! Now, even with our sophisticated, state of the art technology, there are a few steps online retailers need to take to really nip cart-abandonment in the bud.
So here are 10 advanced techniques you can use today to eliminate cart abandonment from your eCommerce site! Let’s dive right into them!
1) Seamless Guest Checkout:
This should be a no-brainer no matter what you sell (unless it’s an item subject to strict government regulation).
Nix the “create an account” requirement if you have not done so already.
Why? Because 37% of abandonments are caused by sites that demand shoppers create an account. How silly is that! Why should a shopper need to create an account to spend their hard-earned money on your products?
2) Keep the cost visible:
Imagine while on the way home after a long day of work, you were passing a pizza shop with a sign in the window advertising the following sale “2 large pies, french fries, and a bottle of Coke $19.99”. It’s not a bad deal, and the pizza is probably decent. You get to the checkout, and suddenly find out that it’s not really $19.99, it’s actually $29.99 + tip, + “condiments fee” + tax.
You make decent money, and you want to get home, so you will complete the sale – but that doesn’t mean you will ever spend another cent at this eatery. Mama didn’t raise any fools!
When this happens online, 60% of the time it ends in an abandonment. To prevent this, be upfront about pricing, to the point that shoppers can view their total cart value without having to go through checkout. Especially since 23% of abandonments are caused by shoppers being unable to view their cart-total while browsing.
3) Keep it simple:
When shoppers go through the checkout process on your site, it should be effortless – no popups, no page redirects, no additional tabs. 1, 2, 3 sold. The best way to do this is to limit the number of pages at checkout to 1 single page, with no more than 12 fields that need to be filled out by the customer. Those fields should only concern their name, address, city, state, country, contact info, and payment details. Followed by multiple payment options (more on that below), “Submit order” button and that’s it.
A striking 28% of abandonments are caused by a complex checkout process. It’s a pretty easy issue to avoid.
4) Website stability is mandatory:
If your site crashes, fails to load pages properly or begins to exhibit other undesirable behavior – that’s an issue that will cost you money. Work with your IT people to ensure your site remains as stable as possible.
After all, 20% of abandonments are caused by website errors.
5) Trust Badges:
Back in the early days of the web, you probably experienced the following popup at least once.
“Congrats you are visitor 1,000,000! Download this file ‘TotallyNotATrojan.exe’ to collect your reward!” Alas, you hurriedly jumped for joy and ran followed the instructions.
A few days later you found yourself at the local PC repair shop trying to understand why your 1999 Compaq Desktop stopped working. Also, this happened in 2005.
Anyways, we grew up, and the above example is not the issue it once was. That’s because many sites use SSL certificates to ensure their security. Make sure your sites’ security badges are up to date.
Especially as 19% of abandonments are caused by people not trusting the site with their credit – card information.
6) Flexible payment options:
No matter how reliable your site is, or how many security certificates you have, some shoppers are still hesitant to use their CC for online shopping. Much in the same way, you might find yourself in a store at checkout and suddenly wish you had cash because the cashier just looked like the kind of person who would totally commit CC fraud.
(According to the internet this is the look.)
That’s why offering flexible payment options through third parties such as Paypal, Google Wallet, or even consumer-loan financing like Affirm, Bread Finance provide shoppers with extra piece-of-mind that their money and data are secure.
This especially true because 8% of abandonments are caused by a lack of payment options.
7) Shipping options and free returns:
This happens with sites big and small. A shopper gets to checkout, everything is going smoothly, they get shipping options and discover that, lo and behold, you only offer “turtle-speed delivery” and nothing else. That’s a problem because shoppers will literally pay more for the same products elsewhere on the web just to have the option of faster delivery.
Seriously 18% of all abandonment is the result of sites not offering shoppers express shipping on their orders.
There is another item, which is that not all merchants offer free returns, and that is a problem. Offer, free returns, it will make things better for everyone.
A further 11% of abandonments are due to poor return policies.
8) Easy site navigation:
If a shopper feels that they need a map to navigate your website, that’s a big no-no. Websites should be easy to navigate, and the learning curve should be as simple as “DO you know how to left-click on your mouse”. But what really makes website navigation even easier – site search! Because this amazing little plugin lets shopper search for what they want with ease!
In fact, site search is shown to increase conversions by up to 20%! This is because shoppers who use the feature to find products have “intent to purchase”. In other words, 1 out 5 shoppers who use site search to find a product is going to complete a purchase during that session
9) Send me my cart:
There are two things that are an annoyance to do when shopping online from a mobile device.
1) Adding a website to favorites just so you can remember it later. Who hasn’t done this at least once? And then you totally forget to check your favorites!
2) Copying URLs to then paste into your notes app (or to email yourself) etc. Who doesn’t have at least half a dozen notes on their smartphone or tablet with URLs to websites they visited half a year ago?
You can easily eliminate this inconvenience (and close more sales) with a “send me my cart” popup on your site. Especially if shoppers can just enter an email address, or better yet connect it to their Facebook account, and instantly have their cart saved in a place they are sure to see it.
10) High-quality details:
This one takes a bit of work to get right, but it’s worth it in the long run. When shoppers are looking at a product, they typically want to know everything possible about it. A picture with a few words is not enough these days. Consider the following example:
This is lazy and unprofessional. Don’t do this on your site. Now consider the next example.
This example is a lot better. It uses descriptive wording and makes the product look appealing. Furthermore, it provides shoppers with a few viewing options for the product. Finally, did you notice the call to action placed on the pricing? That kind of value offer goes a really long way towards getting shoppers to complete the sale.
(Editor’s note: No turtles were harmed in the making of these images)
Datacrushers
Founded in 2015, Datacrushers uses Machine Learning and A.I. along with NLP to identify and recover revenue loss, cart abandonment and discover new revenue sources across any site. The revenue discovery platform completes the deep ongoing analysis of eCommerce websites by monitoring the three main focal points of any site: The User, Site, and Product.
Unlike traditional “cart abandonment platforms,” Datacrushers does not require shoppers and customers to be logged-in to conduct both on and offsite campaigns. We use a wide range of data-driven and analytics based conversion tools to target the shopper at the right time with the most accurate and effective campaign to drive the sale.
Datacrushers is platform, language, and currency agnostic and requires only a few lines of code to get started therefore delivering an ultra-fast go-to-market with minimal set-up time and tech intervention.
Based out of Jerusalem, Israel, Datacrushers has clients worldwide including, The US, China, Russia, UK, Germany, and more.
