How can I reduce my website's cart abandonment rate?

I found that our website's cart abandonment rate is very high. I wonder why people slip away without completing order. Can you give me some suggestion to improve the case?

 

Also interested, thank you.

 

Need a link or we are flying blind here.
Nigel

 

atleast share screenshots of your cart or sales funnel if you don't want to share your website publicly

 

Add customers feedback on the same page to convince new customers to purchase...

 

I have seen some sites, that when you go to close the screen, sends you out an offer, of 10% or something to get you to stay. For cases of logged in members, look at vistaprint, sends out reminders automatically that things were left in the cart, as well, will send out juicy coupons that are hard to walk away from. The good thing about vistaprint is the fact that the cart details are saved for all logged in members....

If the problem is mainly with new clients, can you try to have something where you offer $5-$20 free credit for all new signups?

I would also think that you might be struggling with your image. If I dont trust a site, (or the company behind it) I wont purchase. I might google for reviews before payment, and even your payment methods might stop me. If its credit card details, straight away I leave the site, but if its paypal, I *might* pay.
See if you can reach out and find people to test your site. Maybe adding more payment methods will help, maybe theres concerns over shipping? Without seeing the site, and without you really understanding your site through your clients eyes, all I can do is some random guesses.

 

Get more sales and stop analyzing the inevitable. Your website cart isn't the only that's like this. Are you using a solution like 1shoppingcart, 2checkout, or ejunkie? Or even Paypal? Show us a snapshot of your shopping cart screen so we can see whats going on.

 

Few ideas that may help.
1. The checkout process needs to be as simple, smooth and quick as possible.
2. Shipping costs too high maybe.
3. Customers required to register. I've used sites which offer guest checkout which suits me as it's quicker.

 

A while ago I stumbled upon what I quickly realized is a golden mine on this very topic – a usability study on why and how people interact with eCommerce site's carts. It's a bit long, but my initial impression was that, to a very large extent, all of these make a lot of sense, and I personally value actual research much more than the rampant anecdotes a Google search away. Here's the link:

smashingmagazine(DOT)com/2011/04/06/fundamental-guidelines-of-e-commerce-checkout-design/

Krajten

 

Hi there everyone

I just joined this forum, because I am a professional software tester who is looking to go into business for myself (after being in the IT industry since 2001).
And the test service I am looking at offering, is aimed at exactly that. Preventing abandoned shopping carts (oh, and carts that never get anything put in em to start with).
Anyway I signed up to this forum and went to browse threads and the first thing I see is
"Why is my shopping cart being abandoned?"

Thats a good question (the million dollar question lol).
There are lots of reason people might be placing items into the shopping cart then not continuing with payment....

For example: (in no particular order)

- Maybe they want to find out how long it will take to ship, what shipping costs, or something similar, and this info isnt easy to find, or isn't displayed until checkout, so they stick something in the cart to see what shipping is offered
- the checkout process is too long, difficult or requires too much unnecessary info. People love the web because they can instantly find stuff, instantly buy it, instantly view it...etc. Key word...INSTANT. While the internet is a great way to sell stuff, you have to remember that the process of buying that stuff, for your customer must be instant, or as close as possible.

The following things can turn a customer off after placing something in their shopping cart:

No guest checkout (often people just want to buy it. They don't want to register, or fill out any more details than absolutely essential.)
Make sure your customers have a quick and easy way to "just buy the thing"

Too much info requested, too many pages to click through to buy, etc. Takes too long if they are in a hurry or distracted, and gives the impulse buyer lots of opportunity to reconsider.

Not enough info. For example is your refund and replace policy displayed or summarised as part of checkout? Especially important if you are selling anything costing more than $20-$30 usd

Too difficult or annoying. Do you have ay of the following in your checkout process?
The following can annoy and frustrate people and often they will just decide they cant be bothered any more:

Address info
Address finders: Lookup address fields that match addresses against a postal service database customer types in first few letters of their address and hopes it matches.
Often if the customers address is not on the database, they will be unable to enter it at all, leaving them unable to give their correct shipping address.

Also international addresses. The amount of stores Ive seen which have "international shipping/we ship world wide" plastered everywhere, then when you go to checkout you are forced to enter a US state, and cant select a country (as the website address form has decided you are in the US), your you type in or select your (non US country) and then the for. Still forces you to choose a US state and/or post code. What are the chances that order will actually get delivered to the right address?
Or shipping costs are really high, and not displayec prior to checkout. So a customer has selected a product then at checkout the shipping cost has been added, and suddenly the price to get it at the local store is looking much better.

Or the payment processing service is the reason, ie, customer is on an ipad and the payment processing website doesn't display properly on their ipad, preventing them from filling out their payment details.
Ive seen all sorts of funny issues around payment processing of credit cards, paymate, paypal, visa verification etc which have come down to the browser or device not being properly supported (and 9 times out of ten the merchant service wasnt informing anyone of this)

Captcha testing customer patience...(where you have to fill out the code displayed in a wonky looking picture to prove you aren't a robot spamming the website). Some of these are HORRENDOUS, completely illegible, sometimes on some browsers the image wont even load, and I've tried the audio version of some that just played a load of static noise that no one could ever possibly obtain a code from. And really, if a spammer wants to place a spam order in your store...as long as they pay for it with a valid credit card, why not let them? Lol

And there are many, many other reasons that could be causing your customers to abandon their carts.

As you might have guessed, although there are some things you can easily check, there can be all sorts of reasons for this happening.

The frustrating thing is that if the problem is due to difficulties in the checkout process, its highly unlikely that a customer will contact you to complain. They will just go elsewhere. Chances are one reason they left is because it was taking too long... So they really don't feel like taking mo time to write a complaint...which for all they know may not ever be read or acknowledged), and definitely wont be responded to in the 10 minute time frame they have to find and buy this item

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I am looking at developing a service to address. In my experience as a tester, most software testing is expensive, and is on a project or one off basis,
Ie a software system or website is upgraded, changed, migrated to different system or created and testing is carried out to check all the changes...then after that you are on your own.

Whereas online stores need to be checked constantly to ensure that customers can easily find what they want, and view all the information and options for that product, then checkout quickly without any problems entering their details, or unexpected charges showing up half way through the process.

So anyway, I am looking at whether there is a market for a testing service, aimed at ppl like yourselves who rely on their website/store working properly 24/7. By that I mean not just "online" but with all products easily found, product details correct, and easy to find, and when the customer decides to buy, they need it to be a fast easy process, while at the same time feeling confident that they are buying from a reliable, trustworthy ethical seller. The service will use automation to recreate typical customer actions. Meaning tests can be run on a regular basis at a reasonable cost for you. Results of all testing will be emailed, and I will also monitor for 'mission critical" problems and if they are detected, I will alert you immediately by a pre arranged method (ie phone you till I get hold of you, or text till you respond...etc). The service will have a setup cost which covers the time setting up and customising tests to your store, and then a regular subscription cost, which covers regular test runs, reports and an alert service if needed.

A typical test might cover:
Product search
Product details
Attempted purchase of the same product by a number of customers with different locations, addresses, etc etc (automation makes,it possible to do things that would take you hours or even days to test by hand)

Other potential features include stuff like

Uploading a spreadsheet of new product data, and testing then runs and checks product prices, details, options etc
Regular manual (me rather than automation) run through the entire site, looking for issues that may cause customers to abandon sales

All of the above would be reported on in detail and the reports provided to you.

So maybe we can help each other out...
I would like to be able to ask a few questions from anyone who does business online, about how much of a concern this sort of thing is to you, how much time you spend on trying to solve it, whether or not you have or would consider investing in regular site testing to identify any issues that may be causing abandoned sales, what, if any testing you do currently, whether you have seen this service offered anywhere else, how much you think would be a reasonable price, and so on.

In return I can offer feedback and advice based on a career spent testing and identifying all those things (known as usability issues) that will cost you sales.

I am also going to be asking people to fill out a short anonymous survey on this, and will be offering a prize draw of a free website test evaluation and report to one of the survey participants. Any professional test consultancy where I live would charge you anything from $1000 to over $100,000 for this, depending on your site.

Anyway, for the person who started this thread, have you checked the above stuff?

What information does your store give you on abandoned carts (for example does it give you Ip(and therefore location), item(s) abandoned, at what stage the cart was abandoned?

Start by looking at the data you have from your shopping cart system, see if there is any pattern (ie is it the same product or type of product, the same screen within the checkout process that they abandon, ip addresses from same region

Then go through your store and try and recreate the process as close to possible as the customers who abandon their carts.

Imagine you are in a real hurry and have no patience and need to buy this product within 1 minute as you have a work meeting about to start. Imagine you live at an address which is not that simple (ie apartment number, level, apartment letter (11a), building name, and that all deliveries must be taken to the building manager inbox around the left hand side of the building). Also that there are two cities in your country with the name of your city and yours is the less common.
Imagine you need it to arrive within a very specific timeframe (maybe its a birthday) and cant buy it unless you can be completely sure it will arrive by that date.

With all the above in mind, go through the buying process as far as you can (without actually having to authorise your credit card, often you can go almost the whole way) and look for any of the following

Pages you have to enter info on more than once because it wont accept it
How much info you have to enter in about yourself before you have been show. Return/refund policy, privacy policy etc. whether you can checkout as a guest (just pay, put in your address and you are done) or whether you are forced to register, or link to your Facebook, or give out lots of personal details. You may also want to get some friends to do this for you, as they will probably point out stuff that you, as shop owner, are so used to seeing you don't realise its annoying for customers

 

I hope my advices can help you
1. Check for any tech bug in your checkout.
2. Refine your checkout process. Maybe it's too complicated
3. Use Analytics to know which step they give up
4. Remind customers about un-finished shopping cart everytime they enter the site. Make them feel a little annoying if they do not complete their cart
5. Remind customers about un-finished shopping cart via email
6. You can try give some promotion if they haven't finished it for a long enough period of time

 

I actually heard the host on a TV talk show, on a section about how to get the best deals when shopping, tell the audience that they should put stuff in their shopping cart then not checkout on shopping sites they were a member of, as often when she (the host) did this, she would get an email a while later offering her a discount price or some other special deal to finish the purchase of the stuff left in the cart.
So I guess another reason for abandoned cart... customer was watching that show? lol

 

Perhaps, those "customers" are really bots crawling your site. Most ordinary bots are able to follow through links on your site which adds items to the cart and fill out the forms. Of course they are unable to process payment.

 

Definately look into livechat. They offer a free trial. Your able to see website visitors in real time and location of them. You can have a chat option they can select to use or you can initiate a chat with people browsing your site. As a side bonus it offers great real time analytics about where traffic is comming from adn things like that in addition to allowing your customers to open a dialogue or ask questions.

 

An average shopping cart abandonment rate is about 70%. So maybe you exaggerate the situation in your shop?
Other things to consider:
- checkout flow. Sometimes checkout process may be to long or hard to complete which makes customers leave your shop.
- not enough information
- expensive shipping

And consider sending abandoned cart reminders. Maybe some CMS systems have this option by default. For Magento I'm using this mod https://amasty.com/magento-abandoned-cart-email.html

 

@Krajten, thank you for sharing that nice link. It gives me insights on designing our site elements. We are actually thinking of asking clients to create an account when using our contact form to inquire on something. Our reason is for them to use our back-end project management for clients. We will think of a better way to streamline this so that we don't have prospects who abandon our website because they will have to create an account.

To the OP, there are great insights shared by others in this thread. I hope you can solve your issue. What I have in mind is another solution: using "heatmaps". Check for a product called CrazyEgg.

God bless.

 

If you own an online store, you may have seen the natural tendencies of most of the customers: they want to communicate, need advice, help and require clarifications regarding your products and services. This can be a crucial issue in any kind of business if one fails to provide all these. There are times, when after selecting any product, the customer may want to know some additional details of that product, for example the exact colour or size measurement which is not available in the website In that case, writing a mail or waiting in the queue for a telephonic call may turn the customer impatient and you never know he/she may leave from there. So To stop them from abandoning cart, live chat can be the best solution on your website which can make you the differentiator for turning your website visitors loyal to your brand and not to choose your competitors over you.

Live chat ensures instant assistance that a ticket or email system always lack. Through this live chat solution your website visitors directly converse with you in the website itself if they need any assistance. Through live chat software, you can Offer instant assistance, assist with technical issues, related to your website, get instant customer feedback, keep a track of your visitor’s activities, increase sales conversions, reduce human resource expense and many more.
So implement the best live chat software for your ecommerce business today and see the difference.

More more info can go through our blog: http://www.revechat.com/blog/live-chat-the-next-growth-opportunity-for-your-ecommerce-business/

You can also take the free trail of live chat at https://dashboard.revechat.com/signup/signup.jsp

Regards

Suvashree Bhattacharya
REVE Chat
www.revechat.com
Blog: www.revechat.com/blog/

 

Track your website visitors behavior and make the changes on your website as per visitors click, mouse move & scroll. I am using https://www.mockingfish.com/products/heatmap tool for tracking our visitors behavior.

 

To track your visitors you only need FREE google analytics and nothing else that can be proposed anywhere online...

 

Mockingfish is also a Free tool. You can use this tool for generating Heatmap report of your website.