Wouldn't you love to follow a proven panacea for solving the shopping cart abandonment issues of your ecommerce store and boost those customer conversions?
Is there a magical CSS code or the invincible eCommerce plugin to defeat card abandonment rate? Well, if this was the case, every eCommerce store owner would have purchased it and leveraged it to generate more sales.
Well, there is not one. There are no easy codes or plugins to solve this utmost issue. Every buyer is an individual. They have their own preferences and their own resistance to not finishing their purchase. You can’t probably predict the exact answer why your customer has abandoned the cart.
As Lorii Myers puts it, “Don’t build roadblocks out of assumptions”. If you’re making assumptions about the customer purchase behavior, you really don’t know why they are abandoning their ecommerce cart. This is only the guess.
It’s time for marketers to stop guessing and figuring out the buying personas of your customers. Begin making required changes to your website so that you can elevate the conversion rate and full purchases.
Going Technical
I’ve worked with many eCommerce managers. Whenever it comes to surpass the situations of dearth in conversion ratio, it rarely reverts them to fixing the technical aspects of the store.
It’s easy for them to associate low purchase rates with the palpable things such as high product range, shipping charges, and problems on registration pages etc. They can’t identify the technical reasons.
TIP #1: Browser Compatibility – Keep checking and making sure that the website is compatible with all prominent browsers. According to Jakob Nielse, your design will ultimately be tested by end users. You only have the option to test it yourself before the launch so that you’ve enough time to fix the inevitable issues rather than paying too much catch-up later.
Suppose your website is working fine on the latest version of Mozilla doesn’t necessarily mean it is also working smoothly on Google Chrome. Ignoring cross-browser testing will cost you a lot, this holiday season too.
Speed Is The Killer Factor
Loading time is a major contributing factor to page abandonment. In this fast pace of web, users do not have patience and time to stay on a page that takes too long to respond. This way, you’re allowing the second store to cash-in the things favorable for them.
According to recent marketing studies:
• Typical eCommerce sites take approximately 5 seconds to load. Strangeloop tested 2K top retail sites and found that the average load time for them was 10 seconds. It's too high! Today’s users (especially mobile audience) demand faster sites.
• 40% of website visitors skip the website page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• Amazon is the best example I have to list out. Back in 2006, they experienced 1% increase in their revenue out of the increase in their load time by 100ms.
Not to mention, Google considers page speed factor while evaluating website rankings. SEO expert Brian Dean mentioned it on #20 in his 200 Google ranking factors guide.
TIP #2: Run the speed test of your website with Google Pagespeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix. With the insights provided by these tools, you’ll see the top priorities to turn your website into a faster machine.
Hosting, Size of the files (HTML, CSS, Java, JS, Images, videos), Use of themes, and CDN technology have a major impact on load time. Start optimizing it.
Allure Your Mobile Audience
With visitors rapidly using tablets and smartphones to make purchases, it’s imperative for brand marketers and owners to realize and leverage the effectiveness of mobile platform. Reportedly, the global conversion rates were relatively higher on smartphones + tablets than desktop devices.
Yes, mobile and tablet users are potentially your biggest buyers. Start embracing responsiveness feature of websites and put everything accurately to your mobile visitors. A good development and testing practice will allow you to make files size compact and let users experience faster loading speeds.
Explore Heat Maps & Clicks Like A Nerd
Using a heat map will enable you to discover the areas where your visitors are hovering and why they are not able to finish their order process. It can give you an insightful overview of what visitors do on the different pages of your website and help you improve your site further in favor of your business growth.
If you haven’t tried it, it’s a right time to embrace hover maps, click maps, attention, and scroll maps.
• Hover maps are used for mouse movement tracking. It shows areas of your store where people actually hovered over using cursor of the mouse.
• Click map includes aggregated click insights which shows your visitors’ preferences much clearer than hover maps. If they click on a specific product from your collection page, it does mean they are willing to looking into the item details more specifically. In this case, they’re getting closer to your conversion funnel.
• Attention heatmaps, on the other hand, help you identify the most attentive segments of your website. For Page scrolling insights, you need to go over scroll maps and know how far visitors scroll down a page.
CrazyEgg is the one digital tool that lets you track where visitors are scrolling and interacting based on the heatmap, scroll map, and overlay report insights. Google Analytics is the obvious choice to use for tracking visitors’ metrics.
The Power Of Images To Boost Sales
Human psychology should be applied parallel to any marketing effort. People will not buy anything without seeing it. Via online platforms, this is product image which makes your item comes alive. Joshua Perets (USA clothing store) has relatively higher conversion ratio and their appealing product images are one of the reasons.
Another good one is Cubic Mini Wood Stoves. See the screenshot:
A couple of questions to make product pages more attractive:
• Does your individual product page answer every query of the buyer?
• How many angles are available as images?
• What happens when the visitors hover over the image?
• Are you allowing visitors to zoom in-and- out every angle of the product?
On the other hand, a well-explained video (or even an infographic) can be more beneficial allowing visitors to see how the product actually works! It will surely work more productively than just one or two text paragraphs. Though old-school SEO guys don't follow this approach as they eagerly think more text will help them securing powerful rankings, modern UX supporters find it very promising. SITE123 does it very well on one of their pages.
Customer Reviews
According to SITE123, 72% of online consumers always look for positive reviews to trust businesses more. A study found that 88% of buyers rely on customer reviews before making purchases online. Have you asked your customers to give you feedback? If not, you should try it.
If you’re not displaying any of the customer feedback or suggestions from your buyers, you are truly causing the cart abandonment issues. Encourage your previous buyers to leave you useful feedback and positive reviews.
Moving Forward
Once you solved each of the technicality issues and made requires tweaks to your website, you can sit back and monitor everything. Data gathering is very crucial when deciding further marketing strategies and website changes. With the help of GA event data, eCommerce tracking metrics, and heatmap insights, you’ll get an idea of what works and what doesn’t! Diminishing cart abandonment issues takes lots of data analyzing, research, and time to be fixed. Do not conclude anything too early!
Shyam Patel is a 28-year old SEO consultant. An active Internet user since 2011 with a very curious personality, he always tries to learn about new and exciting things every day in the world of ecommerce, technology, search engines, SEM, and digital marketing.
I hope you enjoyed this article about how to reduce customer cart abandonment rates in your new ecommerce store stop.
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