Shopping cart abandonment is a plague on e-commerce.
Did you know that up to 68.63% shopping carts are abandoned online every day?
That’s a lot of shoppers that are coming into your store, adding items to their cart and then leaving with no explanation as to why.
We’ve all heard the common things you can do to reduce cart abandonment rate such as implement a nice design, ensure all your site is functioning properly (ie. no coding errors), but I wanted to touch on a few things that aren’t all that common to tweak.
Today I’m going to point out 5 alternative ideas that you can implement in an effort to reduce shopping cart abandonment in your WooCommerce store.
Tip #1. Simplify your checkout page
Many store owners subscribe to the idea of collecting as much information as possible when users are on the checkout page.
But what you really should be focusing on is “greasing the wheels”. You actually want people to get through your checkout process with as little friction as possible.
Try removing unnecessary form fields (such as “where did you find us?” and other equally pointless fields).
This will increase your conversion rate and reduce cart abandonment.
Tip #2. Show shipping & taxes on the cart page
One of the biggest culprits for people taking their order right through to the payment page but then abandoning the cart is to find out the “final cost” of the order.
If you know your shipping and tax costs upfront, present them to the user as early as possible, such as on the Cart page before they even get to the Checkout.
BONUS TIP: WooCommerce now has the great ability to accurately detect a person’s location, so enable this if you don’t already as it will ensure that your cart page has the information required to present shipping and tax data.
Tip #3. Try installing live chat
Talking to people directly about site issues as they’re having them can be a great way to isolate specific issues people are having when using your website that would normally cause them to abandon ship.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many times you view the page yourself, you might miss something elementary that users are sticking on and live chat gives you unprecedented access to see what is going wrong and where.
Once you fix those issues, you can reasonably expect a drop in cart abandonment.
TIP: Try this list of live chat solutions for your WooCommerce store.
Tip #4. Give more than one payment option
Several studies have pointed out an increase in conversions once multiple payment options were presented.
Specifically, this 2009 study found that 50% of people who shop online said that if their preferred payment option is not available, they will cancel the purchase.
So whether you add PayPal to your site that currently only has credit card payment or you add an on-site credit card payment option to your PayPal only website (like we did and saw a big uptick in conversions on our checkout page), you’ll be making a great move toward lower abandonment rates.
EASY CREDIT CARD OPTION: Try Stripe + WooCommerce Stripe plugin + a cheap SSL certificate on your site (they start around $10 a year) – it works really similar to PayPal on the backend (flat % fee, no monthly cost), but gives your customers an on-site credit card experience like a full merchant account would.
Tip #5. Let them know what happens next
Our final tip for today is to let your customers know what happens next.
This can take multiple forms such as:
- Advising about your refund and returns policy in a prominent way
- Letting them know how long until they’ll have your product in their hands
- What they can do if they encounter problems (such as product malfunction or order issues)
- …etc
The point is to just eliminate as much ambiguity as possible.
Any more tips?
Have a killer e-commerce shopping cart abandonment reduction technique you want to share? Tell us about it in the comments below!
