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Someone added one of your items to their cart? Fantastic. But that only takes you a fraction of the way to a sale. A staggering 80% percent of consumers abandon their carts prior to checkout, equalling millions of pounds in potential revenue each year.
While you’re never going to completely stop people from second-guessing a potential purchase, there are plenty of optimisations you can make to improve your cart abandonment issues. Here are a few of the biggest reasons e-commerce businesses take a sales hit — and how to fix them.
Your site is slow.
Given that instant gratification is now the norm, it’s not surprising that online consumers are impatient. A recent study found that 57% of customers leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. And if your website crashes, that’s pretty bad too. Not only does a failure-to-load message make you seem less legitimate, 24% of people leave their carts behind if it happens. That’s why it’s important to invest in a speedy e-commerce platform that you can trust not to have outages.
It’s a bad user experience.
In addition to being fast and reliable, your e-commerce site needs to be easy for customers to navigate. If it’s confusing or clunky, people bounce. 25% of users abandon carts for this reason — especially if there are too many cumbersome steps during the checkout process.
Go through the process of making a purchase as if you were a customer, noting any sticky spots that may cause frustration. You can also look at Google Analytics to determine where customers are dropping off the most. This helps you figure out what changes you need to make to increase your conversions.
Your site isn’t mobile optimised.
Failing to design your site for mobile is another huge misstep. Only 18% of people would recommend a business if they had a bad mobile shopping experience, a figure likely to shrink even further given that only 18% of the UK’s small businesses are actually optimised for mobile visits. Make sure that any e-commerce platform you choose works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktops.
The payment step doesn’t seem trustworthy.
People aren’t going to buy from you if they have the slightest suspicion that the payment step is a little sketchy. An easy way to mitigate this is to display trusted credit card logos during the checkout flow —studies show 80% of customers report feeling safer when sites do this. The ability to accept a variety of payment methods is also key here. 42% of shoppers will actually spend more with you if they have different payment options.
Your delivery policies aren’t clear.
It pays to be completely upfront with your delivery costs and times before customers start to check out.45% of shoppers abandon carts if they’re dissatisfied with delivery options either due to price or time. An easy way to solve for this is to include a shipping calculator on the product page or early on in the checkout process to provide full transparency.
