By David Rekuc, Ripen eCommerce
Last year e-Commerce owners lost an estimated $1.79 trillion dollars in abandoned shopping carts. No matter your business size, shopping cart abandonment is hemorrhaging potential sales and lowering your bottom line. Luckily, the fixes are real and manageable. Here are the three best ways to plug the leak and increase conversions in your e-Commerce site’s checkout:
1. Simplify the checkout
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Don’t give on-the-fence customers a single opportunity to abandon. Allowing your shoppers to checkout as a guest increases conversion rates by 45%. Reduce navigation further by cutting out exit points like menu headers and sidebars for another 12% bump in conversions. Guests appreciate low commitment options and are more likely to continue to the final sales steps. Remember, you can always offer them an account after you’ve completed the sale.
2. Boost your CTAs
Switching to a large and direct call to action button can lower abandonment by 33%, and analytics fanatics: you can use this as an excuse to do as much A/B testing as your heart desires. Changing language, size, and colors of your CTA can have dramatic changes on your conversions.
3. Push return and shipping policies
Customers need to feel reassured; in fact, 63% of them want to view a return policy before buying. Make your terms easy to find and clear to read with an affixed or pop-up window at checkout, so customers won’t have to leave the checkout process to read it through. If you can manage it, try including some more lenient return policies to promote as well. While we all can’t offer a 365-day return window like Zappos, a fair and honest policy is more likely to win customer trust.
Between price comparison and the ease of online browsing, it is impossible to completely eliminate cart abandonment. But, with a few tweaks, your site can provide a smooth checkout process to guide users to the finish line and catch the ones who got away.
And when on-site strategy fails, don’t be too proud to beg (or follow up, if you prefer): automated retargeted email reminders are worth an average of $17.90 per email.
David Rekuc (@DaveRekuc) is the marketing director at Ripen eCommerce, a full-service digital agency that offers innovative development, design, and marketing solutions for online retailers. Rekuc has contributed to Entrepreneur.com, Internet Retailer, and MarketingLand.com, among others. For more information, visit www.ripenecommerce.com.
