Description: When you’re running an online retail website, there is always a need to optimize every metric which indicates the sales being completed. One such method is cutting down on shopping cart exits.
How to Cut Down Shopping Cart Exits to Boost Online Sales?
One of the most frustrating things for a marketer in online retail is having customers abandoning their shopping carts.
Let us look at the context here.
Not every online retailer is as big as Amazon. If you’re running a niche online store selling handmade posters, you are a small player. To get people to your website, you can –
- Use E-Commerce SEO to enhance organic discovery
- Run paid search ads on Google in SERPs and shopping ads as well
- Run social PPC campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Instagram
- Use email marketing to reach your customers
The four methods listed above are only some of the many things you can do to bring people to your niche online store selling handmade posters. Each of these methods requires a lot of nouse and hard-work. Let’s say you were running a PPC campaign on Google. Your CPC bid was Rs 10.
When somebody clicks on that ad and comes to your website, the ten rupees are deducted from your budget. Then, the person adds a poster worth Rs. 200 to the shopping cart and proceeds to the final stage.
And then, the person backs out.
You lost Rs 10 from the paid campaign. Ten rupees might not seem a lot to you, but imagine the effort you put in to organize the PPC campaign. All of that effort is worth a lot. Imagine if you actually hire an SEM professional to run the paid search campaign. The salary you are paying that professional is really amounting to nothing.
As you can see, people abandoning their shopping carts can be very harmful to a business. It highlights potential money coming into the business amounting to nothing in the end.
In this article, we try to offer solutions to this problem which help grow online sales multiple times.
Do check: 6 Very Basic Online Survival Tips for Ecommerce Businesses!
Optimize the Buying Process
A big reason for many shopping cart exits is websites having a long buying process.
Even in online retail, the general expectation of a consumer is to buy a product immediately. They operate mentally at the same level they operate when they’re in an actual retail store where they can see a thing, feel it, and but it immediately.
Granted that online retail may not offer the same experience, online stores must try and replicate that process as much as possible.
This means reducing the number of landing pages during the buying process. One easy way of doing this is offering a buy-now option at the product page itself which direcrs a user straight to the payment page. You can also try and combine different pages together, such as address and payment. The more steps you have, the more landing pages you will have to create, and the greater your problems will be with regards to shopping cart exits.
Bring Clarity to Taxes and Shipping Charges Added to Product Price
Imagine your customer sees a product listed at Rs 150. The customer then proceeds to buy the product only to later find that after adding taxes and shipping charges, the bill is Rs. 220. This amounts to more than a 40% increase in the price the customer saw earlier.
Customers hate being lied to. When they buy a product listed at one price and then notice another amount during the checkout process, they are bound to be frustrated and leave the process altogether.
A small retail store online cannot offer free shipping as Amazon does. However, what one can do is be more transparent.
On the product page, tell the customer exactly what the bill will be during checkout. This way, a customer will not feel cheated at the checkout stage and the rate of shopping cart exits will reduce drastically.
Do check: 10 Effective Ecommerce Traffic Building Tips You Need To Know!
Minimize Form Filling
Many people hate the sight of a long unfilled form at the checkout stage. Many online retailers foolishly ask for too many details such as gender, age, salutation, surname, and so on.
Many customers look at large unfilled forms and opt-out of the purchase. They are too overwhelmed by the work needed to complete the order.
The aim of an online retail store should be to always facilitate the quick expediting of the buying process. By asking for many irrelevant details, websites end up frustrating customers and losing them at the final checkout stage.
How can this be stopped?
What are the absolute essential details you need about a customer looking to buy a product? You need a name (just the first name), an address to deliver the package, and the email & mobile number of the person ordering the product. That’s it. If you reduce the input to these details, you will reduce shopping cart exits.
Do check: How To Sharpen Your eCommerce Strategy To Gain More Business
Offer Good Return and Refund Policy
Many people opt out at the final stage because they are not entirely convinced about the product. Maybe they don’t trust the product quality or if they personally should spend money on the product. These doubts lead to them leaving the purchase process.
To allay these fears, online retail stores must consider having a good retail and refund policy. This helps customers be a little braver while making a purchasing decision as they have the backup of always returning the product and getting a refund. Many people buy products on Amazon without hesitation because its refund policy is excellent. Other small retailers must try and instill the confidence of their visitors by telling them they can always return the product if they don’t like it within an agreeable period of time.
In Conclusion
It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that that shopping cart exits are a great loss for any online retail store. To convince a prospect to choose a product only to later back out of the purchase is deflating for marketers as well as the business itself. In this article, we discuss how shopping cart exits can be reduced to significantly boost online sales.
About the Author –Gaurav Heera is a digital marketing entrepreneur and founder at DelhiCourses.in. He started the institute back in 2008 and has played a key role in it becoming the first choice amongst students looking for a digital marketing course in Delhi.
