4 February 2022
Cart abandonment is something that every business tries to avoid. Is your business suffering from checkout/cart abandonment? While this can sometimes be up to the customer – it’s probably been influenced by you (sorry for the reality check!). If your customer has got as far as placing items in their cart and clicking on ‘checkout’, then they really want the products/service you are offering – but something has stopped them doing that all important last conversion. So what is stopping that POS?
While it can be a number of reasons, and the overall package of your business does make a difference to this conversion, we’re going to focus on the top three that are most important and the easiest to solve.
NUMBER ONE : Shipping Prices
Now we’ve all been there, found a product we liked that’s around the price we were looking for, put it in our basket, gone to checkout and…stomach drops! The end price is suddenly double. You go back, double-check the price of the product you’ve decided that you want; you go back to the shipping page and the price skyrockets again. All customers understand that to get a product to their doorstep on-time, the company needs to pay for shipping and distribution solutions. However, increased shipping prices won’t make customers more likely to buy your products. It is better to make the products you sell more expensive and lower the shipping cost, than to hike the price up at shipping.
Either that or put the shipping prices next to the price of your product, this will minimize the amount of customers abandoning their products at the tip of concluding the sales process. Also offer options, slower shipping = cheaper prices, faster shipping = higher prices. Then it’s the customer’s choice.
NUMBER TWO : Competitor Comparison
Sometimes, be it because of their content or their prices, a competitor will win a customer – it’s painful but that’s the businessworld. To improve your chances of retaining customers and getting new ones, it’s necessary to check out who your competitors are and see if you need to up your game to keep customers interested in your products/service. If a competitor’s pricing is better than yours, then see if you can cut yours down or make your overall branding more luxurious so that – though they are paying more – the increased price feels worth it for the lifestyle they are buying into. So go and find your competitors, search keywords, do your research and then analyse your business from a consumer perspective – you might find some key issues you hadn’t seen before.
NUMBER THREE: Too Needy
When a customer gets to the checkout, if they’ve got an account with you then that’s great. But if not, if they’re in a rush and just want to get their product on the way; the last thing they’re going to want to do is spend their precious time filling out forms for your database. If you offer a guest checkout as an option then new customers are a lot less likely to abandon their carts at checkout, and will probably view your brand favourably for not demanding all their details for their first purchase.
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