Unfriendly shopping carts kill your site’s ability to convert sales.
Just when you are on the brink of closing a sale, the shoppers on your site turn away and decide not to buy. If this is a common occurrence in your website, take a second look at your shopping cart design.
Studies have shown that the average online business website loses about 75 percent of its shoppers during the shopping cart stage of transaction. While there may be other factors that have influenced this statistical data, the fact remains that the shopping cart abandonment rate plays a crucial role in the success of your e-commerce site.
However, you can reverse this trend by following some simple and easy steps:
- The fewer steps, the better
A basic tenet in e-commerce is to make the process of buying short and easy for your customers. Try to make your check out method a short, one page affair. Having them fill up too many pages with useless information will only drive them away. Think how straight forward it is to make a purchase with paypal.com.
If this is not feasible, at least apply a logical step by step procedure for your customers to follow and eliminate the extras. Keep all the pages short. Long pages are difficult to work with, and are more prone to validation errors and a system that “nags the user”.While a determined customer will buy from you regardless of the number of steps, a maximum of four in checking out should be ideal for online shopping.
- Include progress indicators
Customers need to know where they are in the shopping process. This holds truer for e-commerce sites where the perception of uncertainty is higher than for brick and mortar stores, where shoppers can see what’s happening with their own eyes.
Label the steps clearly to let the customers know where they are in the check out process. Some of them, especially those new to online shopping, want to check and double check their actions. Make it easy for them to navigate back and forth through the pages.
Progress indicators in graphic form at the top of the check out process will keep customers informed up to the end of the procedure. They follow through to completion even in a multiple-step process, making progress indicators a great way to increase conversion rates.
- Good quality pictures of products
In brick and mortar stores, people hold the items in their hands and inspect them. This is something that e-business sites cannot offer to their shoppers.
Customers respond more quickly to images than to text; so provide pictures of the products in the shopping carts to them remind them of their purchase and the reason for it.
Having product images inside the shopping cart web application also lessens going back to the previous page to verify orders. And forcing customers to constantly use the browser’s back button will only confuse them.
Pictures give better product recall than names since people often remember its packaging rather than its brand name. All these reasons for posting pics lower the abandonment rate for shopping carts.
- Provide clear total prices early in the process
Even while shoppers are still browsing, state the total estimated cost of ordering the products. Customers want to know immediately how much they will be paying for your product, including shipping and handling fees.This is a critical feature. Shoppers are getting smarter; they will feel duped if they are not informed early on of costs and this is a quick way to kill a conversion. Attracting customers with a low-ball lead price is effective only if you follow it up right away with the actual cost of the product to give them time to adapt to the increase.
Try applying these simple tips to your make your checkout process and be amazed as you watch your shopping cart abandonment rate go down in no time at all!
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Great tips! i defiantly agree with 3 & 4, good quality pictures throughout & final prices upfront as early as possible to keep customers going forward to complete the purchase instead of back to the product page to contemplate.
However, tip 1…I do prefer a series of concise forms in a stepped process as apposed to a one page affair for shopping carts as the short stepped process makes the customer commit to the process, lessening the chance of them backing out and breaks the task down intomanageable chunks. With a one page shopping cart there is the benefit of all the required information being displayed upfront to the customer, however the first thing people tend to do is scan down the page to see what information is required, a long form could cause drop offs as customers are put off. With a concise short (as you’ve said about 4 steps) stepped process the task is split down intomanageable chunks and if they start to waiver in the middle of the process they’re already committed as they’ve spent time filling in the majority of the form and can see they are near the end.
Good point, I meant one page per set of steps, rather than 1 long page, I’ll clarify that.
Yes, a very long form scrolling down forever would be my idea of hell too!
What’s that saying again about a picture…worth a thousand words I think it was. Pictures do sell.
point 4- ‘Provide clear total prices early in the process’
How would you handle this for orders where shipping rates will vary depending on both the location the goods are being shipped to and the total weight of the order? Both are prime factors in calculating shipping costs and I struggle to think of a way to show these costs anywhere other than the final checkout page after the customers shipping address has been entered.
Yes, a good question!
What I have opted to do is set my default shipping location to be where the bulk of my customers are – UK – so they get the benefit of the default 1shopping cart country location setting.
(They happen to get free shipping in the UK as a credibility builder for my company, since it’s a high-priced item.)
You could add a delivery options page to your site, so they can do some research before they get to the final check out page, so there’s no nasty surprises – and highlight it as a “benefit” to “check out our flexible delivery options” (See Comet link below).
You could adopt the “ebay seller” option and list the delivery options and costs, and any customs information with the product description, and leave it to the customer to work out which one is appropriate for their circumstances, if you think these things might be a deal-breaker for your customers.
Amazon include a full despatch and delivery section: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=502482. A whole section is overkill for most sites, but some useful strategies there, such as how to manage returns efficiently.
Comet uses this approach: http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/advice/188/Delivery?cm_re=homepage-_-colleft-_-CometDeliveryService and has also added a special promo panel with a video and a delivery rates links specially for the Christmas period.
Hope this helps – do let me know if you have any more questions.
Cheers,
Colette