10 Surefire Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment in eCommerce Environment

Understanding why shoppers abandon their carts is essential. Checkout may be too complicated, a lack of surety may be present, or a preferred payment method may not be supported.

You want to ensure that your strategies to reduce cart abandonment are based on why it happens in the first place. These ten should help you!

1. Exit Intent Popups

The final and arguably one of the essential strategies to reduce cart abandonment is the inclusion of exit intent popups. You wouldn't believe the extent of applications that an exit intent popup can have.

Essentially, your site would be monitoring for a specific condition. Perhaps that cluster is about to navigate away from your page or is about to do a carrot clearance.

When the popup triggers, it offers valuable information and a call to action, which typically makes the customer reconsider current abandonment.

2. Visible Cart Summary

Never underestimate the extent to which today's population will abandon a task if the smallest measure of difficulty is presented. Does it sound a bit sad? Certainly! However, you want to make sales, so you need to work around it.

Forgetfulness is one of your biggest enemies in this regard. Sometimes, potential customers simply have doubts, or they forget what they put in their carts in the first place. Rather than checking back to verify the size or color, people may just leave your site entirely.

In some cases, customers are willing to check, but navigating to the cart page is so complicated that they just don't bother.

So, how do you solve this? You do so with a consistent reminder. All you need is a small cart summary view that maintains a consistent placement on the site, regardless of the page being browsed. Consider implementing it as a sidebar.

Load it up with a short item list and the total cost.

3. Simple Checkout Form

Have you ever bought anything online? When the time comes to check out, where is your mindset? The chances are that you want to complete your purchase and get on with the rest of your day.

Imagine that any customer who visits your site thinks the same thing. They want to be done as quickly as possible. Therefore, if your checkout process is tedious, expect people to go elsewhere.

There's a subset of necessary information and tasks that must be completed. Why add anything else to the process? Make it short and spicy, and this problem won't be adding to your current abandonment worries anymore. Include a website chat support if possible so you can answer their questions asap.

4. Payment Option Variety

Having appropriate payment method variety also contributes to your ability to reduce cart abandonment. Here's another little scenario for you. Imagine that there's a customer who loves to use PayPal.

Why would that be? PayPal is a payment gateway known to preserve some level of anonymity and security. People can buy what they want without providing you with their card information.

Regardless of how secure your payment gateway is, sometimes changing perceptions is impossible. So, imagine that such a customer is ready to buy a laundry list of your most expensive items, only to realize that you don't offer PayPal as a payment method.

That customer is probably heading somewhere else, even if the value is not as good, just to be able to use the desired payment method.

No one is saying you need to have every payment option available. However, at least get an understanding of all the popular ones and the more common obscure ones. Support those, and you should be fine.

5. Targeted Email Follow-up

Targeted e-mail follow-ups help you to reduce cart abandonment for two specific reasons. First, some people genuinely forget that they intended to buy the things they left in their carts.

In other words, you would be dealing with a temporary abandonment that risks becoming a permanent one without your reminder.

Alternatively, some added items to the cart and probably didn't have a solid conviction to buy. However, you can use email to help convince them.

What's important is that you minimize the effort required by the buyer. Include a link in your e-mail that takes them straight to the stage of checkout they were at before they exited the page.

Additionally, you can throw in a little discount or coupon code, as shoppers are always looking for savings.

6. Guest Checkout

You may be tired of hearing about it by now, but shoppers want to avoid what they see as unnecessary effort. Sadly, that sometimes means creating an account.

There are quite a lot of people who load up a cart on a site they have no account for. You may think they have no intention of buying, but they certainly do.

The only problem is that they're often presented with an account registration page when they're ready to check out. Some e-commerce websites have that policy. You just can't purchase unless you have an account.

Sure, there are advantages to going about things that way. However, do they outweigh your ability to make sales? If no, then implement guest checkouts.

Think about it seriously. What more do you need to know that the items needed, payment method information, and where to ship? If people want to buy without signing up, let them.

7. Delivery Options

If you have one delivery option, it's going to work for a lot of people. That sounds good, right? The problem is it's also not going to work for many people. Do you see where you have a situation on your hands?

Some people in this world live life at 140 miles an hour. Waiting is not their thing, and they'd probably even pay the cost for the item they want twice just to have it the next day.

Other people are enticed by free delivery. If it takes metaphorical centuries for the item to arrive, they're perfectly good with that.

You're selling to both sets of people. Offer a mix of options that appeal to convenience, speed, and cost.

8. Display All Costs

Do you know what's annoying? Thinking you have a grip on precisely what something is going to cost you, only to find out the actual cost is higher just before you're ready to buy. Nobody likes that.

Show the total cost to the customers as quickly as possible so they don't abandon their carts out of annoyance. If there's tax, shipping, etc., be upfront about it.

9. Social Proof

So, imagine that the lawn outside is growing out of control. Half the cast of “A Bug’s Life” and Animal Planet have established their homes there. You need a lawnmower.

You head to your favorite e-commerce site, and there are two. One has a five-star rating with 400,000 reviews. The other one is cheaper and appears to have a feature set that can get the job done, but it has no reviews. Which one are you most likely to choose?

Maintain that perspective as you contemplate implementing social proof as a part of your strategy. Your site must have a review system, and accessing feedback should be a straightforward and intuitive.

Good product testimonials can sell your items for you. Some shoppers simply don't buy items with no reviews.

10. Use Helpful Errors

Don't lose sight of the fact that you're dealing with people at the end of the day. Humans are flawed by nature, and this means that they make mistakes.

As is the case in other areas of life, the best way to help those who make mistakes on your site is to inform them that they're going in the wrong direction while providing some kind of guidance to get them where they should be.

Errors should not induce panic and concern. Consider design choices, as well as the information included.

After reading an error, your customers should feel two things. First, they should be aware that a mistake was made. Second, they should feel confident knowing the right thing to do after reading that error message.

You must create an external and internal knowledge base to help your customers find the answers to their common questions and aid your sales team in answering queries made by shoppers.

About Exit Intent Popups

If you want to go with the exit intent popup strategy on your side, there are a few things you want to know. First, consider the following benefits:

• Attention-grabbing
• Elimination of distractions
• Higher conversions
• Easy to implement
• Lower lead cost

You don't need to know how to code to implement one. An intuitive pop up builder should allow you to take advantage of drag-and-drop functionality. However, in designing your exit intent popup, you want to be very deliberate.

Choose an attractive color scheme and ensure the message is short and to the point. Additionally, at least one action button should be present.

Perhaps you just want a customer to buy something. Your pop-up could display a discount offer with a button that allows for redemption.

Maybe you want people to provide personal information for offer notifications in the future. Your pop-up could appeal to customers not to leave without signing up for an exclusive offer.

Conclusion

Cart abandonment is a massive challenge for retailer revenue. Thankfully, with strategies such as exit intent popups, diverse payment methods, guest checkout, etc., you should be able to lower the frequency of the problem at least.