Why is understanding abandonment necessary? A whopping 69.57% is the statistics of an average global shopping cart abandonment rate, based on the 2020 forecast. If I had an e-store, knowing the numbers, I would be shattered

A mindset you have to uphold here is to understand the reason or the cause of such human behavior. A customer selects the product he is willing to purchase, and then something happens, and he retrieves from the purchase decision and abandons the cart.

So, What Is Cart Abandonment?

It is a concept used in eCommerce to describe the shoppers who add items to their online cart or even start the checkout process but leave the site before completing the purchase. Certain factors determine the reason for such behavior, i.e. excessive shipping charges that get added in the checkout process, no guest checkout options, no multiple payment options, etc. 

How To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment?

It's annoying to know why thousands of visitors abandon their cart before checkout. This approach is quite common, and this is when you have to come up with techniques to reduce such behavior. 

Provide Clarity On The Additional Costs

Don't put your customer to surprise knowing the additional charges incurred in the checkout process. Expenses such as shipping cost, delivery charges, tax charges, hidden costs, are added to your product value. Make sure no such thing occurs. 

Your customers are the asset that you have to nurture. Make sure to be transparent on all incurred costs for the product they wish to purchase. One thing to do is to display all costs upfront at the time of product selection. This indeed is a way to avoid the astound that the customer feels. The best way to diminish cart abandonment is by providing free shipping to customers. But sometimes providing free shipping does not come under the policy of the store, the last thing you can do here is to notify the customer with the total incurred cost beforehand.

Provide Guest Checkout And Social Logins

A random visitor who is asked to create an account in an eCommerce site is most likely to leave abandoning the cart. Filling out the email address validating it and providing a password will be quite annoying for a visitor who has no plans of making future purchases, where there are several options available for them.

Provide a way most easier for your visitor, and here social logins would help. Anticipating the time that would be consumed throughout the checkout process, pulls back the person from making the purchase decision. Login with your Facebook and Google are the mostly found social logins. Adapt that which you think will comfort your visitor to make a better purchase decision.

Provide A Simple And User-Friendly Checkout

A problematic and complicated checkout process is one of the primary reasons for cart abandonment. A smooth and secure checkout is a dream of every customer, which indeed will assure him come for repurchases, but when it turns the other way round, it will lose some potential customers. The elongated checkout process is, the higher the chances of cart abandonment

Keep it short and straightforward. Make sure to avoid the elements that are unnecessary and focus on the necessary information. Try to contain your checkout processes in one place. 

Provide Effortless Navigation

Navigation within the website made easy is the relief for the customers. A smooth navigation system will help in reducing cart abandonment. For several eCommerce websites, it is often found that when a user clicks on the back button after finishing a specific tab, all the information is omitted and users are asked to fill in their data again. It is bothersome to customers. Getting prospective customers going through several pages will scare them off your website until they can pay for a product. 

The thumb rule is to ensure that consumers don't have to browse through more pages before they can buy the stuff. Similarly, the customer interface would be reasonably straightforward to identify the most critical elements they need to complete their order. 

Better Loading Speed For Websites

Does your site take more loading time? You are missing out on a massive number of potential customers due to this. We usually select the product, and in the checkout process, there will be an issue with the loading speed, and eventually, the customer will backout. Work on your checkout page and improve the speed and quality.  Find out where more time is consumed and optimize to rule out the problem in the future. Make sure to optimize the images to manage the gap between quality and speed. 

Provide A Clear Return Policy

Policies are the backbone of every eCommerce store. Policies are created, keeping in mind the purchase behavior of a customer. There are chances a shopping cart is abandoned if the customer is not satisfied with the terms and conditions. The customer might be tempted to purchase the product but is backing out due to your return policy.

Have a transparent and robust policy on returns. Provide them with enough days to refund or return the product if it has defects or if it doesn't meet their expectations. Users should feel more relaxed when shopping that will prompt the customers to repurchases.

Provide Payment Options

It would be tragic to see a customer leaving the cart practically for not getting enough payment options because of the unavailability of the preferred payment method. People moved to digital wallets, which are often called e-wallets. Therefore it will not be enough to provide only limited payment options such as credit card and debit card. The more choices you offer your clients, the more relaxed they feel when making the order.

Provide A Convincing Image

An image should portray a brick-and-mortar feel to a person when they visit your store.  One of the biggest online shopping problems is that consumers don't get to check out the items physically. It can lead to circumstances where consumers get an underwhelming product relative to their expectations. Make sure the image you upload is the same picture of your product. Providing different angles of the product picture will enable you to assure customers of product quality.

Create Scarcity

There are moments when a shopper needs some extra motivation to go ahead and finish his purchase. It is where the shortage can be used to build the desire to buy now.

Another tactic is to indicate how many units there are left of a product. Telling the consumer, for example, that there are only three remaining dresses in the size and design they want will push them to buy based on fear of losing out.

Another way to manipulate scarcity is to install a countdown clock. It works when you're doing exclusive offers and flash sales. Once consumers know that they only have a few hours to get the deal, browsing around is less likely to be wasted.

Send an Update Email

Sometimes it happens that we drop something in the cart and forgets about the purchase. Here we can create an automated email system to which we can send out the email to customers who have entered their login details. We create an opportunity for the customers to complete the checkout process by providing a backlink to the checkout page with the selected product details. The automated email can be sent in a series that can benefit from bringing back the revenue that would have disappeared.

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