E-commerce websites and online businesses are facing a new kind of challenge: Shopping Cart Abandonment. You might have heard of the term for the first time, but the concept has existed for a long time.
Different organizations on shopping cart abandonment have conducted many surveys. If you search its rate on Google, you will see a huge figure popping up in front of you, showing how many percent of people leave their carts unattended. Moreover, the most recent studies show a gradual increase in abandonment rate across all industries, with the latest figure of 69.57 percent. Furthermore, talking of WooCommerce’s abandonment rate is as high as 70%.
You might think, “Is this even a real concern?”. Maybe it is. Imagine what if you could convert even half of the percentage into customers. Wouldn’t it give a boost to your sales?
Therefore, consider applying the below-given strategies to earn more and keep the profit arrows pointing towards the sky.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
You might have seen the term “shopping cart abandonment” come up in articles or blogs about improving your e-commerce website. Or you might have read it right now. Whosoever you are, let’s understand what it really means.
Shopping cart abandonment is when shoppers add items to their shopping cart but leave without completing their purchase. Abandonment can happen for many reasons, such as not finding shipping costs on the checkout page, remembering that they had already purchased something else via another site, or getting distracted and closing out of the tab before finishing the purchase process.
Perhaps you may be a customer reading the article right now and considering this concept to be natural. But, if you think from a seller’s perspective, the percentage of sales lost due to shopping cart abandonment can be pretty overwhelming. The potential customers that have been added to the end-of-the-funnel are completely out of their reach now, and there is no way to re-engage them.
In other words, some customers leave the website without purchasing the product because they find the checkout page difficult to understand. Therefore, you should focus on decreasing this rate more than anything else right now.
7 Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment in WooCommerce
Now we know what it means and how high the abandonment rate is. Let’s list things you can do to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
The steps might seem tricky initially, but as you implement them individually, it will improve and be easy for you to understand everything. Let’s start with the basics!
1. Ensure the Checkout Process is Simple
The number one reason shoppers leave your site without buying anything is that they get confused during checkout and can’t find where they are supposed to enter their credit card or any other information.
Keep your checkout page as clean as possible, and don’t ask them unnecessary questions to avoid such situations. Don’t place any redundant options on the checkout page, which can disturb the customers. Keep it related to payment only and nothing else. If they want to buy a product, let them do it as fast as possible.
2. Offer a Discount or Coupon Code
This is one of the ideal ways to increase your conversion rate and reduce shopping cart abandonment. When customers enter your site, offer them a small discount to make them stay on your website and complete their purchase process.
The discount can be 10%, 15%, or even 20%. Just ensure you don’t go overboard because this could frustrate people instead of inviting them to buy something from your site.
In addition, you should also mention the terms & conditions of these coupons before adding them to the cart page because many customers have been known to cancel orders after they have redeemed the coupons.
3. Send an Abandoned Cart Email
This is one of the best strategies to re-engage visitors who were about to complete their purchase on your site but somehow left it open in a browser tab instead of clicking “complete order".
Once a customer opens such emails, there will be two options:
- To finish the checkout process and buy something from your site
- The second is to ignore it and never bother you again by shopping or buying anything from your store.
As we all know, ignoring sending emails doesn’t work well these days (especially for e-commerce websites), and people tend to return and complete their unfinished business as soon as possible. So, ensure email campaigns are set up correctly, and the emails are personalized with the product and order details. Also, always remember to add a call to action at the end of emails.
4. Leverage Exit-Intent Popups
It is not a magic trick by any means, but many people call it that because of its simplicity and ease of understanding this concept. What we mean by ‘Exit Intent’ in this case is that when someone is about to leave your checkout page (or add to cart), a popup appears with an offer asking them whether they want to complete their purchase or not.
Furthermore, it will lead them directly to the payment page instead of returning them to the main website. Do you know why? Because when customers find themselves back on the main page after closing a popup, they probably won’t buy anything from there. They would leave the website to find something else.
Therefore, you should use a WordPress plugin like FireBox to create enticing exit popups that perfectly blend with your websites to convert visitors into customers. It doesn’t matter whether you have coding knowledge or not; you can use our popup builder easily. FireBox offers precision targeting, smart triggers, and multiple popup types like classic popups, sticky bars, fullscreen overlays, etc.
Visit How to Create an Exit Popup in WordPress if you are interested in this kind of popup.
5. Make Use of Trust Badges and Social Proof
Another possible reason people don’t buy anything is that they are unsure about your business or the product you sell on your website. To change this perspective, use ‘trust badges’ like BBB (Better Business Bureau), trust seals of brands, security signs (like SSL Value), etc., on WordPress while developing the website. It will boost trust among visitors and convince them that it’s safe to deal with you instead of searching for any other store.
Moreover, you can also leverage social proof by adding numbers, i.e., 2345 people bought this product last month underneath each product thumbnail on your home page. It dispenses enough motivation for potential buyers to click on those images and learn more about them.
6. Offer Multiple Payment Options
Offering several different payment options for customers should be your top priority since you never know which one is the customer’s favorite. This way, it will increase the chances of people buying something from your store by giving them the right product at the right time.
For instance, someone came to your site to buy a ‘blue sweater’ but left without completing his purchase because it wasn’t available in other colors. Then, you could offer them an option called “PayPal Checkout” (or any other payment merchant), where they can select any color as per their choice and complete the checkout process smoothly.
So always try to offer multiple payment methods like Paypal, Square, Stripe, Amazon Pay, etc., because it will save you time and effort to deal with them later.
Also, always ensure your website has up-to-date SSL certification and other security indicators.
7. Enable Guest Checkout
Offering guest checkout is another good tactic to reduce the abandonment of shopping carts because it’s free of risk for store admin and customers. Hence, the customers can keep their billing, shipping & other sensitive information private without sharing it with the site owners.
This way, people are more comfortable buying products from your site since they don’t have to worry about getting spam emails or phishing emails in the future, which could damage their online reputation if friends or family members find out.
So, enable the guest checkout process on your WooCommerce website using WordPress and watch orders flow like a river.
8. Offer Free Shipping
One effective way to reduce shopping cart abandonment is to offer free shipping to your customers. Free shipping is a powerful incentive to encourage shoppers to complete their purchases. When customers know they won't have to pay extra for shipping, they are more likely to go through with the transaction.
To learn how to set up a Free Shipping Bar in WooCommerce to promote this offer effectively, check out our article on How to Create a WooCommerce Free Shipping Bar.
Conclusion
Reducing shopping cart abandonment becomes easier once you know what your customers want and need to decide on their purchase.
Further, no customer wants to ‘feel cheated,’ so e-commerce sites need to offer refunds and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Remember, offering discounts is helpful in some cases, but it can backfire if not implemented correctly.
A pro tip: the main objective of a business is to generate revenue through sales, not through donations or freebies like giving away products or services for free (unless you are running something like Wikipedia). So always try to fix this issue before it affects your e-commerce business.
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