Visitors to your e-commerce site add products to their basket but do not finalize their order? This is called cart abandonment. Depending on the sector, this figure can be more or less strong, it can even reach 84.4% for the travel industry.
In this article, I will offer you 5 best practices to reduce cart abandonment.
What is the Cart Abandonment Rate?
The cart abandonment rate corresponds to the result of the following formula: Abandonment rate = (the number of transactions made divided by the number of baskets created) x 100
For your e-commerce site, the cart abandonment rate is an essential indicator to follow on a daily basis. The idea being to integrate it into your dashboard to follow its evolution.
Best Practices to Combat Cart Abandonment
Now let’s move on to the 5 best practices to set up on your e-commerce site.
1 – Give Confidence to Your Visitors
In a physical store, the display case and the interior give your visitors an idea of how you act (store tidy or untidy, cleanliness or dirt, etc.). They can also ask questions to the sellers to be reassured.
Everything is different on a website! The visitor has no direct link with you. If he connects at night, you will not be able to answer his questions if he goes by chat or telephone because you will not be available.
You must, therefore, highlight the essential information directly on your website. To reassure each visitor, it is important to highlight:
- the certifications and awards you have won for your product or the quality of your service.
- the opinions of customers who have already bought from you
- the telephone number and email address of your customer service. It may never be used, but it will give confidence to your buyer who will know where to reach you
- the page presenting your company, which is often called “Who are we?” or “Our history”. It must be present in the menu of your site or the footer. If the visitor wonders why he would trust you more than another, he will look for information on this page!
- the delivery conditions, the means of payment, the loyalty programs or all other elements that can allow your customer to trust you.
So that your visitor can discover this information at a glance, you can summarize it in a reinsurance banner. Present on almost all pages of your site, undecided customers will not be able to miss your arguments.
2 – Optimize the Pricing of the Delivery
The cost of delivery is one of the most frequent obstacles to buying online: 44% of visitors abandon the transaction due to excessively high delivery costs. Ideally, clearly display the cost of delivery to your visitors as early as possible.
Several solutions are available to you to transform this weight into a real marketing argument!
Stand Out From the Competition by Offering a Competitive Price
Keeping your delivery costs has some advantages: you have the flexibility to encourage your visitors to become customers, for example by offering them delivery.
Did you set up a standard rate delivered in the relay package and a rate at home? Explain well to your customers what all your prices correspond to.
Even if the sites include more and more the price of delivery at the price of the product, you can stand out by offering the most competitive price by not including them.
Include Delivery in the Price of Your Products
The free delivery costs allow us to cross a psychological barrier at the customer.
If the delivery costs offered can exist for any type of product and without any reason, it is also possible to show your customer that you are making a gesture in his direction to encourage him to buy from you.
Offering the delivery costs if the customer subscribes to the newsletter can also be very advantageous: a loss of income at the time, but a possibility of keeping your customer in the long term by sending him personalized offers.
For the first purchase on your site, to reward loyalty or on certain products that do not sell. Find your opportunity to offer delivery.
3 – Make Payment Simple and Quick
When the customer arrives on the page where he must choose his means of payment, it’s won! Well… not all the time.
It is enough that his preferred means of payment is not available on your site, for him to say that in fact, this 1001st pair of shoes is not so pretty and that he leaves your site.
My advice not to make a misstep: offer at least 3 different means of payment, even if the bank card is used 80% of the time to pay according to some survey. Paypal allows, for example, your customers to crack more easily on your products: no need to go get their bank card, just a code. Internationally, no additional costs and insurance directly included: that of being reimbursed if the seller loses them.
If you offer “unusual” means of payment such as the American Express card, the Be Smart card or Paylib, highlight them and communicate them on your website!
4 – Offer an Optimized Purchasing Tunnel
The more your customer advances in the purchase tunnel (a phase which takes the visitor from the click on the basket to the purchase confirmation email), the more it costs you by not making the purchase. Indeed, you will have already spent a lot of money for example on targeted advertising on social networks so that he decides not to choose your product.
During the payment phase, put it in front of a page as simple as possible, so that it does not find any distraction and is well focused on the purchase. Hide the header and footer of your page, add reinsurance elements and the different means of payment.
5 – Relaunch Your Abandoned Baskets Thanks to Remarketing
Remarketing is a good way to stay in the minds of your consumers and make them want to fall for your products.
Thanks to cookies, you can set up display advertising. On all the sites to which your future customer will go, he will see your product appear in the advertising inserts.
Thanks to emails, sending personalized offers and reminders is a breeze! If it is a client who has already given you his email address, or if he has created an account before withdrawing, this is perfect. You will be able to touch it by addressing it directly and advising it on alternative products.
How Do I Find Ideas for Improvement?
To make your actions even more effective, I advise you to analyze the websites of your competitors. Position yourself as a visitor wishing to buy some products, visit the site, go to the purchasing phase: put yourself in the shoes of a demanding customer.
Watch what they offer their visitors, what they do worse than you, and what they do better than you. With this analysis, you will have a better vision of the elements to improve at home or even to rethink completely.
What You Must Remember
To limit cart abandonments, think carefully about what is bothering you when you order on sites other than your own. Try to take a critical look, analyze what your competitors are doing and you will have all the keys in hand to find the vanishing points for your site.
By reassuring your visitors, by offering them the payment method they prefer and by having a real strategy for the delivery costs of your articles, you will succeed in reducing the number of baskets abandoned on your e-commerce site.
Set up performance indicators to observe the evolution after the modification of certain points or and take advantage of A / B testing (test between 2 visuals or solutions to keep the best performing) to make the best choice!