Retail e-commerce site owners are constantly on the lookout for new ways to optimize the consumer shopping experience and boost conversions. Yet, despite great efforts, an average 68.81% of digital shoppers abandon carts before making transactions, leaving trillions of dollars in company products in the company’s hands. Website visitors who registered with the e-commerce site only to abandon carts can be re-targeted by means of multistage trigger emails. Trigger emails remind customers why they initially browsed through the website and entice them to return to the website, recover their abandoned carts and make purchases. Incentives are the most common and most effective method of securing conversion via trigger email. The most astute e-commerce site owners will implement these methods can recover on average 18% of the abandoned cart items.
In an ideal world, retail e-commerce sites would not be forced to resort to offering discounts in order to make sales among site abandoners. Even better, site owners and developers would be able to prevent shopping cart abandonment altogether.
Realistically, a 0% abandonment rate is not possible. However, retail e-commerce site owners can take a series of actions to optimize the consumer shopping and checkout experience and remarkably reduce their company’s cart abandonment rate.
Most causes of shopping cart abandonment can be corrected if retail e-commerce site owners adhere to the following cart abandonment prevention checklist and modify their sales and marketing strategies:
Minimize perceived risk associated with online shopping
Despite the prevalence with which it is used, online shopping continues to be perceived as inherently risky. Customers fear that their order may be processed incorrectly, that the website is not secure, or that their identities will be stolen upon inserting their credit card information. Adding ssl certificates and trust seals, as well as customer testimonials, raise the website’s credibility and increase conversions. Usability tools can help record customer actions, in order to determine exactly why customers tend to leave the company’s website and prevent recurrence.
Reveal all costs from the start
A primary reason for cart abandonment immediately prior to checkout is the irritation and dissatisfaction caused to customers by the presentation of hidden costs, including required complementary items, shipping and taxes. The initial price viewed by the customer must be the final price that he pays, if cart abandonment is to be reduced. Retail e-commerce site owners must ensure cost transparency and present a shopping cart that calculates all costs as the consumer buying process proceeds. One way to facilitate this method is to use geo- targeting solutions to present customers with the shipping costs relevant to their location.
Interact with customers as they shop
Despite the distance created by the digital shopping experience, customers continue to crave intimacy and interaction while mulling purchases. First, retailers can use personalization technologies to present different banners/messages to different customers. For example, if a visitor is browsing the site for the first time they can be welcomed to the site and even offered a welcome incentive. If customers are returning customers, or customers who are arriving from an affiliate site, they can be greeted and handled accordingly. A more intimate interaction can be in the form of live chat. Chat invitations can be customized to match the consumer’s shopping needs. Offering live chat to help customers make shopping decisions has been proven to effectively increase conversions. Other methods of interaction likely to reduce cart abandonment include revealing to the customer how far along they are in the checkout process and how much money was saved by making a specific purchase at a given time.
Personalize product recommendations
Today’s shoppers are extremely busy. They look to the internet to provide a speedy solution to their consumer needs. Providing customers with real-time product recommendations based on their user behavior helps customers reach the merchandise they seek, increases the overall shopping cart value, presents upsell opportunities and ultimately boosts conversions. According to a Barilliance study, up to 31% of e-commerce revenues were the direct result of personalized product recommendations.
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Auto applied coupons at checkout -Avoid diversions on the checkout page
When it comes to spending money, customers can be fearful, hesitant and tend to be in constant search of reasons to delay making transactions. Usability tests show that having a coupon code field on the checkout process could actually increase shopping cart abandonment; when a visitor spots coupon or discount code field in the checkout process, they might not always remember the coupon code they’ve received via an email or a popup and once they wander off into cyberspace looking for the discount, odds are they are going to become distracted and not return.
This serious problem can be easily solved by doing away with coupon codes altogether and using instead auto-applied coupons on email campaigns. Clicking on one takes the customer directly to the site and automatically applies the coupon for them. Now no codes are needed.
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Conclusion
Following the above cart abandonment prevention checklist will enable retail e-commerce site owners to reduce the devastating blow of cart and site abandonment on revenues and will diminish the need for re-targeting techniques employed to promote abandoned cart recovery through trigger emails. While cart abandonment cannot be eliminated entirely, adhering to this checklist will optimize the consumer’s shopping experience, promote increased customer satisfaction and exponentially boost conversion rates.
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