Published on September 23, 2010 Growing your business: 10 ways to lower the abandoned cart rate
Abandoned carts are a huge challenge for shopping cart business owners. An abandoned cart is where someone visits your website, puts items in their cart, and possibly even signs up for an account with you, but doesn’t go through and buy.
These are very warm leads for you – the customer has found you, come to your site and started to buy from you. But stopped. Why? Answering this question and tapping into the abandoned carts on your site, and even recovering some of those sales, can make a huge impact on your bottom line.
Think of it this way: isn’t it easier to market to someone who has already visited your site and started to buy from you than trying to attract a whole new customer who hasn’t even got that far?
The rates of abandoned carts across all industries is very high and there are a lot of reasons why people may abandon their carts: they might not like your shipping costs or how long it will take them to get the products, they might not like your returns policies or terms and conditions, they might find it too hard to check out, they may be deliberately shopping around. Forester Research has estimated that globally, the rate of abandoned shopping carts is 88% which is a phenomenal statistic.
So don’t get discouraged by a high rate of abandonment. Here are some things you can do about it:
1. If you have Ozcart, use the Recover Carts Manager. This keeps a track of sales that are started and not completed and gives you an opportunity to email the customer to find out why (or offer them something to come back to you).
2. Review your shipping costs and policies. How long will things take to get to them? How much will they cost? Do you accept international shipping? Do you have shipping insurance? Are the prices for shipping quoted accurate (this will depend if you have set up dimensions of your products and weights correctly so that the live calculator can work things out)
3. Review your returns policy.
4. Look at your product descriptions – do they give people enough information? People may add something to their cart on the basis that they like the product photos then before they buy think that they need to go back and check some information: like colour information for example.
5. Review your payment processes? Do you charge a surcharge for certain payment methods? Are they easy to understand?
6. Review your terms and conditions with respect to your competitors
7. Review your product prices with respect to your competitors
8. If you have some big orders that have been abandoned, don’t just write to the customer, ring them. They may be more willing to talk to a person who is polite and helpful – it may be that they just didn’t have time to complete the transaction and had since forgotten, or got lost on your website.
9. Look at your cart’s checkout: do you make security obvious enough? make sure there are no errors showing and if there are contact your cart provider’s support team to get them sorted. Turn on the SSL sidebox showing customers that your checkout is secure, and maybe even write a page about how to checkout talking about security. People do worry about credit card fraud so show them they have nothing to worry about.
10. Whatever you do, stay motivated and don’t give up. Think of this as a huge opportunity to gain extra sales without huge amounts of extra marketing. A discount coupon emailled to some selected abandoned carts could make the difference between a big order being placed or not. It costs 5 to 10 times more to attract a new customer than market to an existing one, so it’s well worth your while to turn as many of these warm leads into sales as you can.
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