How to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment
Have you ever heard of shopping cart abandonment? This term refers to user behavior, where people give up ordering before completing the process. Around 75% of online shoppers tend to do this. If you have the power to convert half of these people, you could double your income in no time. Find out how you can make your online process of checkout much more efficient here.
One common mistake that a lot of online businesses commit is including several steps between adding items to the shopping cart and completing orders. Therefore, your choice of shopping cart software has to give you an option for single checkout pages.
This doesn't mean that the submit button will send users directly to a completed process of checkout; it simply means refraining from extended series of input and questions before customers reach the last page of checkout.
Ideally, a process of checkout should only come with these three steps:
Step One: Adding items to the shopping cart.
Step Two: Going to the desk of payment to fill out details.
Step Three: Reviewing these details and confirming.
Keep in mind never to include surveys in the process of checkout, either. Pages of checkout should simply ask minimal questions related to the shipping and payment process. Other questions can be asked after your customers have become more loyal to you. As for now, completing the payment and checkout is of the utmost essence.
The only details required to complete fulfillments of orders would be customer names, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and the payment details. When it comes to physical goods, shipping addresses would be needed, too - nothing else.
If you tend to accept credit cards, you will also need fields in which to input the credit card numbers, expiry dates and billing addresses. However, if you are accepting payment through another gateway, you might not need to ask for these; the gateway should deal with them on their personal pages instead. Asking users to type in the exact same details over and over again might make them abandon the entire process.
Ask yourself whether billing addresses are needed to complete the order and comply with the regulations of your financial institution. If so, get fields for those, too. Whatever the case, after you establish good customer relationships, you can ask them to provide you with additional details through separate forms.
If credit card details are needed, make it your top priority to have secure web pages. Everybody who wants to input credit card details will look for locks on their browsers.
Merely having Secure Server Layer certificates will not suffice. They need to belong to your personal company, as well as match your personal domain name. If not, browsers may complain and customers might leave in an instant. Even without this warning, though, customers might give up once they see unknown URL domain names.
SSL certificates do not just offer safe and encrypted data transmission all over the internet; it also shows credibility. SSL certificates also proclaim that issuing authorities have approved and checked you out as a legal business, so make sure that its logo can be seen on the page of checkout.
Another point that is often overlooked would be the web pages' loading speed. This would be especially important when it comes to the process of checkout. Slow loading pages are not just frustrating for customers, but will also make them assumed that you are sharing your server and therefore have far too much traffic.
For faster loading, you need to ensure that your pages of checkout are basic and plain when it comes to looks and levels of sources codes. A lot of the time, designers and HTML editors make use of tons of JavaScript and style sheets, which can significantly slow down your page displays. Unless they are absolutely important for your page, they need to be eliminated from the pages of payment.
Of course, there are more points that need to be taken into consideration to avoid checkout abandonment. When followed properly, you can be guaranteed that your income will double sooner rather than later.
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