Imagine a situation in which you’ve launched an eCommerce business. You’re done promoting it, and now your website has started gaining traction too.
More and more people are visiting your website each day, and some are even enthusiastically adding items to their cart. But a moment later, they simply vanish, abandoning their cart as it is.
Can anything be worse than that?
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the most common problems in the eCommerce world. It’s the process in which people add items to their cart but leave your website before completing the checkout process.
Most people don’t take this problem seriously. If you’re one of them, you have no idea how much money you’re leaving on the table.
Luckily, this problem can be solved. And by doing that, you can easily recover your lost sales and instantly increase your conversion goal too. So let’s find out how to reduce cart abandonment quickly to increase your revenue.
1. Reduce Page Load Time
A major reason why people leave your website is its loading speed. No one likes slow websites.
For eCommerce websites, people expect the loading speed to be under 2 secs. This means that if your load time is more than that, the possibility of losing your sales increases too.
So, optimize your website speed to stop that from happening. You can use free tools like Pingdom to check your site speed.
There can be various reasons why your site is loading slow. It can be due to your web hosting service or your CDN. You should also consider reducing the number of plugins you use, compressing your website images, and minimizing the number of JavaScript and CSS files on your site.
Sometimes you may also need to optimize your database to speed up your site. It’s hard to tell why your site is loading slow. The reason for that can be different for different websites. So you have to identify what’s causing it for your site.
2. Improve Your CTAs
Another way to reduce cart abandonment on your website is to improve your CTAs. The call-to-action that you use on your website needs to be clear and straightforward.
Sometimes marketers try to be clever with their CTAs. But instead of working for the best, it only confuses your users forcing them to abandon their shopping cart altogether.
To stop that from happening, use simple and plain action verbs to label your CTAs. Instead of using generic terms like Next Step or Continue, use intuitive labels like Continue to Payment, or Review your order, etc.
This will make it clear for your users to understand where they’ll land upon clicking on a specific button. It’s a great way of avoiding confusion and reducing cart abandonment on your website.
3. Use Cart Abandonment Push Notifications
Many people often abandon their shopping carts, thinking that they’ll continue shopping later. But they tend to forget about it after some time.
Sending cart abandonment push notifications to such customers is a great way of gently reminding them of the items in their cart.
Doing so can quickly boost your sales and increase your conversion rate. Plugins like PushEngage make it easy to send such notifications.
You can use it to recover your lost sales simply by adding automatic browser notifications for your customers who abandoned their carts.
It lets you select the number of times the notification needs to be sent. You can also choose when to send it. You may want to send it right after the customer abandons the cart or several minutes later as per your understanding.
You also get to personalize your push notifications by adding images of the items in your customer’s carts.
This reminds them of the product they wanted to buy and encourages them to continue shopping.
4. Optimize Your Payment Process
Another way of reducing shopping cart abandonment is to optimize your payment process. Many people exit your website simply because they don’t have the patience to complete the long and complex checkout process.
So try to offer a better payment experience. You can do that by removing the unnecessary fields from your checkout form or clearly labeling them as optional where possible.
If you’re using a longer form, try splitting it into 2 or 3 different steps with fewer fields in each step. This avoids confusion and doesn’t overwhelm your buyers with a complicated payment process.
Another important factor to consider while optimizing your payment process is to choose a trustworthy payment software.
People aren’t comfortable giving away their payment details unless they are sure that the payment option is a secure one. So it’s important for you to pick a software that makes security their first priority.
It’s also a good idea to offer several payment options rather than just one. So apart from using their cards to make the payment, let them connect your site to PayPal, Apple Pay, or Amazon Pay. This will allow them to make the payment even without entering their credit card details.
For customers who choose to pay through their card, give them an option to save their details. That way, they don’t have to enter their details every time they make a purchase. Additionally, you can offer payment plans that allow shoppers to make monthly payments on their purchase. Such options simplify the checkout process and reduce cart abandonment to a great extent.
Shopping cart abandonment happens in all eCommerce businesses, and it will continue to happen. That’s because not every visitor landing on your site makes a purchase because they need the product. This is especially true for window shoppers. Cart abandonment for such shoppers is extremely common. And you can’t help it.
But losing potential customers because of a technical malfunction or a broken checkout process can massively drain off your profits. So try stopping that from happening. The above points can help you do that effectively and regain your lost sales easily.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.