Statistics have shown that shopping cart abandonment occurs at least 70% of the time. What if you could convert even half those online shopping carts abandonments into sales?
It goes without saying that the internet is exploding with retail sales. Over the past 10 years (give or take), the internet has evolved into a consumer’s retail shopping mecca. Yet it appears that there may be a significant problem with the consumer’s online shopping experience that many e-commerce website owners are overlooking – the average online consumer is leaving items in their shopping carts 70% of the time or more. That’s a scary statistic when you consider how much money in sales that this equates to.
Interestingly enough, there are a number of reasons for shopping cart abandonment such as how easy it is to navigate through an e-commerce website or the ‘pleasantness’ of the overall consumer experience.
Regardless, there are several ways that you can enhance the consumer’s experience and stop losing those online sales.
Here are three helpful tips for reversing the trend of shopping cart abandonment:
1. Be a good listener
If there is one thing you need to know about e-commerce sales it’s the fact that consumers oftentimes talk to one another. Chew on this statistic for a moment: 92% of consumers trust people they know and the recommendations they make when it comes to purchasing products or services online. Are you giving them good stuff to talk about?
2. Make it easy
These days, we are an impatient ‘want it all now and quickly’ society and going through a lengthy checkout process allows a customer time to change their mind and abandon the cart all together. Make it easy for your customers, install something like PayPal express checkout (according to PayPal this will reduce shopping cart abandonment rates by up to 50%) and offer a couple of different payment methods to suit different demographics of your customer.
3. Be relationship-conscious
The failure of many e-commerce websites is oftentimes attributed to not building relationships with their customers. Contacting your primary customers and sales prospects every month is a good idea. You can e-mail them and offer something of value, especially if it’s useful information that encourages them to buy from you in the future.
These three tips should help you to prevent customers from leaving your website by enhancing their shopping experience. You’ll be able to build long-term relationships and generate future repeat business in the process. Not to mention the fact that they will talk to other consumers about their shopping experience at your e-commerce site and this will generate referral business over the course of time.
Have you had any success in reducing shopping cart abandonment rates? Any tips to add to the above?
