Why Customers Abandon Shopping Cart
So – one of your customers has filled up their shopping cart and is just about to check out, when suddenly, they abandon the process entirely and leave the site. Your chance at a sale has evaporated and you’re left wondering why.
It turns out there are many reasons why shoppers abandon their carts – but luckily, there are ways to address the problem. Here are the most common reasons, and what you can do to stop it.
Your checkout process is too complicated
If they see that there are numerous pages of forms to complete, many users will simply abandon the checkout process and search for something simpler. Long sign-up processes are arduous and boring – especially if a customer doesn’t have any kind of AutoFill function on their browser.
How you can solve it: implement a guest checkout and put all of the forms on a single page. This removes as many barriers as possible on the way to a purchase, and gives customers less of an opportunity to simply abandon the purchase entirely.
Tax, delivery and handling fees
The extra fees added on during the checkout process are enough to make even the most hardened online consumer abandon a purchase. If a customer has already come to terms with the fact that the product they want costs £25.00, it can be disheartening and irritating to get to the checkout and discover that it will cost as much as £30.00 or even £35.00 for them to actually have the product delivered.
How you can solve it: prioritise low delivery costs and try to offset things like tax as much as you can. Send out offer codes for free delivery, and offer different price options for faster or slower delivery, to give the customers as much control as possible.
Shopping cart slow load times
If your site is taking an age to load, or if the next page of your checkout seems to have frozen, the likelihood of a customer abandoning their shopping cart will soar. We live in an age where instantly just isn’t quite fast enough anymore, and any delay in load times could see your sales take a dip.
How you can solve it: optimise your site to ensure that load times are speedy, and try not to cram your checkout pages with endless fluff and filler. Your checkout should be completely simple, with only the necessary forms and information displayed.
Concerns over site security
Even at a time when online shopping is fairly normalized, many people still have concerns about sharing their credit card details online – especially if a site does not display the relevant security logos and symbols.
How you can solve it: make sure that all of the correct security logos are on display at every stage of your checkout process. It’s been proven that trust badges can actually increase conversion rates, as well as reducing abandonment rates, so it’s worth tracking down as many as you can to win your customer’s trust.
