Shopping Cart Abandonment –
Make Shopping Convenient

Continuing from where we left last time in this blog we will look at how making shopping convenient for your customers can help you in reducing shopping cart abandonment. This is our fourth blog in the series which deals with ideas to combat shopping cart abandonment; if you have not already, we recommend you read our earlier blogs, blog 1 – Right Infrastructure Helps, blog 2 – Give Your Customers Everything they Need, blog 3 – Stay Competitive.

• Guest Checkout

Customers hate, they simply hate, filling forms and registration. Forced registrations are considered as a serious threat to your sales as many customers avoid investing time and effort inputting personal information during registration. No matter how important registrations are for you simply providing the guest checkout option, along with the registration option, can do wonders for your conversion rates.
Even if the customer chooses to register, businesses must ensure that they only ask for the most critical information say name, password and an email address. The less you ask your customers to do, the more likely they are to stay with you. If required the other information can be solicited after the user has made the purchase.

• Fewer Clicks for Faster Checkout

Today’s shoppers are driven by speed and want everything at the click of a button. They shop online because it provides them the convenience of purchasing things easily from their device. But if the checkout process for purchasing online is long and convoluted they might very quickly lose interest and abandon. Customers prefer options like express checkout/ one page checkout over multi-page checkout. It is best to offer an express checkout option to your customers which allow them to forgo the obligation of creating an account, among other things, and go straight to the checkout screen to shipping and payment details before completing the order.

• Make cart items visible at all times

Customers find it annoying to remember items they have placed in the cart or to keep going back to the cart page to see the products in the cart. Consumers while searching for a product, comparing products, etc. would like to keep an eye on the items they have already selected and going to different page every time to view them kind of breaks the flow. They want ready access to the cart regardless of the page they are on. Many studies have reported that websites having the updated shopping cart visible across all pages have relatively lower abandonment rate.

• Show Progress

It is always good to show customers where they are in the buying process. Having a progress bar informs customers where they are, what more will it take for them to complete the process. It not only makes the process transparent but also prevents customers from guessing what comes next which might not always work positively for businesses (for example if a customer takes more time at a particular stage then they might extrapolate their experience at that stage and expect more such steps to be in line).
Stay tuned for our next blog in the series “Shopping Cart Abandonment – Build Trust”.