Online shopping has occupied a significant position in all our lives. Online stores do not come with a limited space factor, thereby offering various choices to the buyers.
This time-saving option of shopping from the comfort of your house has shifted people’s choice from the traditional mode of shopping. Additionally, online stores offer massive discounts that conventional offline stores fail to provide.
It provides the buyers an opportunity to compare a wide range of products from the price point of view and then select the product thoughtfully.
With so many perks of online shopping for the consumers, there are some demerits too. These demerits include:
- A time-consuming supply chain or an inefficient delivery system.
- An improper tracking system.
- Complicated returns.
Similarly, there are sellers with a great rapport in the market, making significant figures as a part of their turnover. On the contrary, they too face a lot of difficulties in achieving success for their online store.
It is not an easy task to design and create an online store for the owners. Maintenance and management is again a challenging job in this field. It requires a lot of patience and understanding of the market to run a successful online business.
It isn’t easy to attract people to your product and make sales. Even this is not it! The sellers have to go through the challenges that appear in front of them, such as shopping cart abandonment, and it restricts their business to a large extent.
There are many reasons why shoppers abandon their carts. Webhostingprof has researched the latest eCommerce statistics and found that over 46% of small businesses offer free shipping in order to boost their profits and reduce cart abandonment.
What do you mean by Shopping Cart Abandonment?
In online business, when the buyers select the products and add them to their final cart but do not make a purchase and thus abandon the products and leave, your website is known as shopping cart abandonment.
In recent times, it has emerged as a significant factor of losses to the online business. It shows that you remained successful in drawing the consumers’ attention towards your product but fail to convert it into sales. There are tremendous reasons for shopping cart abandonment.
The expression to calculate the shopping cart abandonment for your platform will be as follows:
Rate of abandonment = 1 – (Sum number of visitors who have finished the checkout procedure / Sum number of visitors who have included products to the cart)
Major Reasons for shopping cart abandonment:
Multiple factors result in shopping cart abandonment on websites. These are as follows:
1. Inconvenience during checkout:
An important factor that has emerged as the main reason is the complicated process of checkout. It becomes tiring for the consumers, and thus they do not complete it.
The checkout process must be easy and quick for the consumers. It should not involve filling in too many details, especially the ones that are not required.
Customers should be provided with the option to save their points for future orders.
An easy checkout process has resulted in positively keeping the consumers interested, and on the contrary, a long and complicated form makes them leave the cart in between.
Another important reason in this respect is the concerns related to security. Users share a lot of sensitive information, including email address, date of birth, and credit or debit card information.
Worldwide, the numbers of cyber-attacks are causing hefty losses to business organizations. Consumers are aware today, and they understand the importance of security.
Nobody wants to take even the slightest of risk when it comes to threat-related to money. Therefore, it is suggested to have an SSL Certificate from a trusted provider to keep the information of the consumers safe. SSL Certificates display the presence of HTTPS, and consumers also rely a lot on the same.
3. Additional costs:
It is seen that the websites often impose hidden charges or taxes that make the consumers disinterested in their products. Statistics say that the most prominent reason for abandoning the cart items is the added costs that the consumers don’t find necessary. Websites should ignore any such costs for good sales. Consumers should decide the necessary and unnecessary taxes because some of the taxes are levied as the essential part of the sales. Shipping charges should also be nominal for good sales and business.
4. Members-only checkout:
Some websites only allow the permanent member to make a purchase. If you want to be a member, it is often seen that the process is too long.
Websites in the market sell products only to members, and you cannot purchase them unless you go through the complicated process of signing up.
To expand your consumer base in the market, it is advised to keep the checkout quick and easy to the online stores. It attracts consumers to your website; make them repeatedly order from your websites, turning them into loyal buyers.
How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment?
It involves providing the user with incomparable provisions to shop on your website, which is not received by any of them from any other platform.
It can be easy and fast delivery, live support to solve their queries, pricing in a fair manner, and a good supply chain. All these steps help in converting the visitors into permanent buyers.
Additionally, a few other ways have been emphasized to reduce shopping cart abandonment. These are:
1. Clear pricing
Clear pricing is essential to give buyers a clear picture of the product. The prices shown on the website should be final as they help the buyers make up their minds.
The cost shown will be the cost in which the buyer is interested in buying a particular product, and a change in pricing will change their decision to make a purchase.
In this case, it is advised to put only the final costs and ignore any hidden charges. A fair breakdown of the price should be given while presenting the consumer’s final billing details for their references.
2. Easy checkout
The importance of a user account for a business cannot be denied, but the process should be quick and easy.
Avoid adding unnecessary fields in the guest checkout. The fields like adding address more than once, adding the birth date should be avoided entirely unless necessary.
Consumers should make a purchase even when they do not want to be a permanent member of your website. Providing them with the option of setting their billing and delivery option will also help save their time and make the process less tedious.
3. Deploy secure payment options
Security should be kept as a top priority for the consumers on every website globally. Installing SSL Certificates available at different rates in the market and choosing wisely between the alternatives is one of the best tricks to ensure security easily.
Apart from this, the security tags and certificates should be placed on a website at places where the consumers see them easily.
It helps develop trust among the buyers as the buyers today are very aware of the security and the cyber attacks throughout the world.
Also, including techniques to pay through a single click and avoiding multi-stage processes should be an integral part.
4. Delivery chain simplification
It is advised to the online stores to provide two types of delivery. It includes standard delivery and comparatively fast delivery.
Delivery speeds do influence the consumers’ decision to make a purchase or not from a specific site.
Options of same-day delivery should also be provided to the buyers for urgent cases. It is mostly preferred these days in developing cities.
It is seen that the consumers are even willing to pay extra amounts when the products are available at a faster speed to them. It has emerged as a significant milestone in successfully attracting consumers to your website.
CONCLUSION
Shopping cart abandonment has emerged as one of the critical issues in reducing a particular online store’s sales. Entrepreneurs need to pay attention to the different aspects and take every action thoughtfully.
Online business is not just about creating, attracting stores, and placing the items in front of the consumers. Do not ignore the competition that you have in the market. New big and midsize businesses are emerging in the market, and there is a cut-throat competition between them.
In this way, it is cardinal for you to stay at the top of your game. Design your strategy correctly and implement it.
One can also take the help of professionals or experts to avoid significant mistakes.
Hence, it is essential to formulate a system that will strike a correct balance between your profit and the comfort of the consumers and accommodate flexibility.
