Suffering Cart Abandonment Issues?

Shopping online is one of my very favourite (and dangerous) pass-times. This month alone I have ordered sheets for my king-sized bed (whilst lying in bed), bought a summery dress (from Instagram) and attempted to buy some light fixtures for my house. When I say ‘attempted’ I mean I tried but it was so damn hard. I gave up – more on that later.

The E-commerce market is taking over the world as many people find that the convenience of purchasing things from their couch, in their pyjamas at 9pm on a Tuesday is The. Best. Thing. Ever. While earning income in their sleep is amazing for online shop owners, what you might not know is that you’re missing out on millions of dollars’ worth of sales (collectively that is). In 2016 there was a reported $4.6 trillion worth of products with cart abandonment! $4.6 TRILLION!

Imagine what those extra sales could do for your business.

We recently read an article published by PayPal about this rising epidemic and thought that they raised some good suggestions for making the payment processes on your website easier, minimising the cart abandonment rate you may be experiencing.

PayPal’s top tips:

• Provide more channels for your customers to purchase through. “The more channels, the more sales.” This could mean having a mobile friendly version of your online store, maybe link it to a facebook shop or even connect it to ebay!
• Make the checkout process super simple. You can apparently do this by implementing PayPal’s new OneTouch™ feature on your site (shock horror, it’s an ad for a new product! To be fair though, PayPal is amazing, and we love them).
• Know your market. If you sell across the seas (or state lines) make sure you’re giving those customers their preferred payment method as an option – it might increase their chance of purchasing!

Now, getting back to my earlier story-  I, like many of my fellow online shoppers was put off purchasing this bathroom ceiling light because:

1. The ‘add to cart’ button was at the bottom of the product page. I had to scroll all the way down (on my iPhone).
2. I had to create an account
3. My preferred method of payment (which is co-incidentally PayPal) wasn’t an option. Additionally, I didn’t want them to turn out to be a dodgy shop front for a Russian black market shop and what I was actually purchasing wouldn’t even make it through customs. In the end I gave up and promised to do a better search later.

I think a lot of people can relate to this scenario, so we thought of some Top Tips of our own when it comes to online stores:

Reduce the amount of clicks

Don’t make us click 300 times and tell you what we had for breakfast before we eventually find the ‘complete purchase’ button. The ideal number of click’s to complete a purchase is around 4. After this, we get a bit distracted by the amount of sub categories, product options and account details that we have to sift through prior to giving you our money. Keep it simple, stupid.

Have a guest checkout

No, I don’t have time to sign up I JUST NEED THIS FLIPPING DRESS!! Always have an option for your users to check out as a guest, that way they get to checkout their way. Or even better, have an option to create an account by saving their checkout details.

Follow up

The one tip we stole from PayPal (because we liked it so much) was to set up a follow up system, whether that’s through emails, retargeting ads or snail mail. Studies show that sending a follow up email within the first hour of  cart abandonment increases the purchase rate.

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