#25 Shopping Cart Abandonment Solutions

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Welcome aboard for podcast #25! This is the sixth in our ‘Cool Stats For Cool People’ series and we will be looking at shopping cart abandonment solutions.

What is shopping cart abandonment rate? Well picture this; you are in a shopping mall with a cart full of goodies, you get to the checkout, leave the cart there full and run out of the store! That is essentially what people are doing when they abandon their shopping cart on your website; they get all the way to check-out and for whatever reason, don’t proceed with the transaction.

But first up, what have Andrew and Heather learnt this week? Heather was filming a video with a client when she was reminded of the importance of toning back jargon when addressing an audience. Remember that you are probably very used to the lingo in your niche but other people may not know what you mean. A good rule can be to think about how you would explain it to a 10 year old child. The chances are then that anyone will understand! In fact, when Andrew and Heather published on Amazon, they were told that content that sits at about a 4^th Grade level does the best.

Last week, Andrew was presenting to a group of business owners on LinkedIn. Right before going on stage he realized that LinkedIn had made two significant changes that very morning. What he learnt was that it’s really not that hard when you’re thrown a curve ball to just explain to the audience and turn it to something positive. He turned it around and explained to the audience that they were the first class in the world being taught the new material and that they would learn together.

On to solutions for shopping cart abandonment; did you know that between 30% and 70% of people that go through your shopping cart end up leaving before purchasing? That’s a lot of lost revenue potential! We have action items for you today to help you reduce cart abandonment.

1) Put all of your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) up front. For example; do you offer a return policy? What is the guarantee? How long does the guarantee last? Include information on shipping and delivery timing. The best FAQ pages cover every possible objection that a customer may have in their mind.

2) Where possible, include the cost of shipping in your item price. Often people abandon the cart when they realize that the shipping for that $15 item is $50. Around 44% of abandonments are due to shipping costs. For a great example of a website done well, check out theiconic.com.au.

3) It’s all about credibility! Remember customers will be very concerned that their credit card information is safe. If you are familiar with encrypting, you will know to look for https in the URL which indicates that it is secure. However many people will not know to look for that so make sure you clearly display seals on your site and around the ‘pay now’ button that show payment is secure.
Testimonials are also a good thing to have. These show that others have used your product and been happy with them. If you have any kind of money-back guarantee, make sure this is clearly displayed.

4) Have a live chat option. This can be live, or you can use a recorded version. Live chat is great for reassuring people and allowing them to ask their questions in real time, for example to a technical support or customer service person. There are a couple of cool tools for this; Zendesk or Zopim are ones that we like.
Small businesses or solo-preneurs may not have the resources to use live chat. This is where you can use recorded messages. There are tools such as Speakpipe which allow you to put an automatic voice message into a system and get alerts for it. You should look into cookies which allow content to remain in the cart when customers go away and come back, as obviously if they leave a message overnight you may not get back to them for a while.

5) Avoid distractions! Have big buttons that make the steps of the process obvious to your customer. Make sure the data fields are bright and prominent and that there is no doubt in visitor’s minds as to what they are expected to enter into the fields. You should also keep using images of the product to remind people what they are buying. Make sure you limit navigation once they have started the shopping cart process. This means limiting what menu is available at the top to click into, probably only leaving the ‘home’ option. Remember to also remove social media buttons as these provide a distraction that will click away from your site.

6) Use a two-step sign-up process. For example, step one could be name and email while step two is all the other data such as credit card details. This way you can link it to your email system (Mailchimp etc) and can contact people if they have not proceeded with step two, offering to help or more information. For a good example of this, check out cafepress.com.

There is one more podcast left in this series; coming up next is decreasing bounce rates for your website.