Check it Out: 10 Ways to Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment

It’s not over until the cash register rings

A customer has found your site, browsed your store and added several items to their cart. You’re home free, right? No so fast...until they’ve confirmed their purchase, you’re still at zero, and you still have plenty of opportunities to derail the sale. Fatal flaws in your checkout process can not only cost you the potential sale at hand but also drastically decrease the likelihood of that customer ever returning to your site to buy from you in the future. If you’re experiencing a high occurrence of shopping cart abandonment, here are 10 ways to fix the obstacles and annoyances that are driving away customers and crippling your conversion rates:

1. Eliminate all chance of unpleasant surprises.

Make sure customers have all the information they need upfront to make a confident buying decision. This includes confirming the availability of the item; calculating promotional pricing or discounts; mapping out shipping options, costs and timetables; specifying whether or not sales tax applies to the purchase and clearly defining your return policy. If a customer reaches checkout only to discover that the particular item they wanted is out of stock, ineligible for an advertised discount or costs more to ship than they are willing to pay, odds are good that will be the last you see of them.

2. Display relevant details in the cart.

The shopping cart itself should provide a clear overview of the pending purchase at a glance so that customers do not have to navigate away from the checkout process to confirm the details of their order. Keep in mind that by this point in the process, your shopper may well have clicked to and from the cart numerous times as they selected multiple items, browsed various categories of products or compared one item to another, and they may be fuzzy on the specifics of everything they’ve chosen. Without the benefit of being able to glance down into a physical shopping cart to review their selections, they need reassurance that the package that lands on their doorstep will contain exactly what they intend, so be sure to provide thumbnail images, descriptions, quantities, sizes, colors, prices, availability and applicable discounts for each product in the cart.

3. Allow changes within the cart.

Every time your customer navigates away from the cart, you’re running the risk of losing them, so make sure that they can edit details such as quantity, size and color without having to locate the product page a second time.

4. Offer multiple payment options.

If you’re conducting e-commerce business online, your site should be tied in to a secure payment gateway. However, offering the option to complete the transaction through a third-party processor like PayPal or Google Checkout can put some customers – especially those who may not shop online often – at ease because they don’t have to release their credit card number and billing information directly to you. Conversely, PayPal and Google Checkout shouldn’t be the only options you provide. If a customer does not already have an account established with one of these payment processors, they may not want to create one just to do business with you.

5. Don’t require customers to create an account.

Without a doubt, it’s awfully tempting to require customers to create an account to complete their purchase because it will allow you to collect valuable data from them for future sales analysis and marketing. However, given the sheer number of social media and e-commerce sites that your customers likely interact with, they may very well have account creation fatigue. They may not want to establish yet another user account and password just to make a purchase, especially if they don’t necessarily anticipate ordering from you again in the near future. The best approach is to offer two options: checking out as a guest, which will expedite the process, or creating an account, which offers conveniences appealing to those who do shop with you often, such as eliminating the need to re-enter their shipping and billing information every time they make a purchase and allowing them to check on the status of an order. The key is to let your customer make the choice that suits them best; don’t force the issue and lose a sure sale in pursuit of future marketing opportunities.

6. Simplify and streamline.

Online shoppers are notoriously impatient, so don’t ask for more information than you need to complete the transaction, and don’t break the checkout process into more steps than necessary. Make sure as well to display a breadcrumb trail that indicates how the checkout process will progress. If a customer can see at step one that they only have three steps left to complete their order, they won’t get impatient or frustrated as they move from one screen to the next, not knowing what’s coming next or when the process will be done.

7. Cater to the on-the-go shopper.

When evaluating your checkout process, don’t forget about mobile users. A customer may be standing in the bricks-and-mortar store of your competitor and comparison shopping on their phone. If you offer the better price, don’t you want to make it as easy as possible for this customer – who’s clearly ready to buy – to order from you on the spot instead? This is another reason why it’s critical to streamline the steps within your checkout process as much as possible as well as to ensure that form fields can be easily completed on touch-based devices. Walk through your checkout process on as many different types of mobile devices and platforms as you can get your hands on, and don’t waste any time in eliminating any obstacles or road blocks that you discover.

8. Don’t give up too soon.

In the age of multitasking, sometimes a customer will simply get distracted before they have a chance to complete their transaction. The phone rings, the baby wakes up from her nap, the computer freezes, the pizza delivery guy arrives, etc. Or sometimes, they just need some extra time to make a decision while they continue to do research, get opinions from friends and the like. While you can’t do anything to mitigate this type of offline interference, you still have a chance to save the sale. A persistent shopping cart retains the items your customer has selected for a set period of time, whether that’s a few hours or a few days. When your customer has a chance to return to their computer, they can pick up exactly where they left off rather than facing the hassle of tracking down each item again, even if they had closed their browser window.

9. Never underestimate the importance of the human element.

If your customer has a question as they are progressing through checkout, the easiest, most reliable way to ensure they don’t lose momentum is to display your customer service phone number prominently at every step along the way. A simple question should have a simple resolution, and usually that is best provided in real time by a human being. If you leave your customers to their own devices to find the answers they need, you’re running the risk of allowing them to become distracted or frustrated and losing all interest in completing the order.

10. Reinforce trust at every turn.

As with all elements of doing business online, trust is key. In the absence of face-to-face human contact, you must rely on your website to build trust for you if you want customers to choose to spend their hard-earned dollars with you rather than with your competitor. Some elements of trust-building in e-commerce are obvious. Do you display your SSL certificate to reinforce security? Do you feature customer testimonials or reviews to boost confidence in your reputation? Is it easy to locate your company’s phone number, physical address and return policies so they feel assured that they can resolve a problem or obtain a refund without hassle? Other elements are less tangible. Does your site have a polished, refined look and feel overall, or does it look dated or sketchy? Do you offer value-added content like how-to videos or blog articles that convey to your customers that they are doing business with experts who are knowledgeable and passionate about their products? Thanks to the proliferation of Internet scam artists, the burden of earning trust with online shoppers is steep, but it is surmountable with careful attention to detail.

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Walk the Line: Balancing the Resources and Rewards of Social Media

For those charged with growing a business in today’s marketplace, social media can present a bit of a quagmire. With all of the hype around social media and the proliferation of social networks, it’s easy to get sucked in to the vortex, spending countless hours obsessing over follower counts, scouring the Web for interesting content to share and seeking out opportunities to cultivate relationships with key influencers. However, no business – no matter how large or small – has unlimited resources to dedicate to social media. You must find a healthy balance between the time and energy you invest and the rewards you stand to gain from your participation. As with any marketing endeavor, success starts with a plan. When determining how to direct your social media efforts, you take into account three key elements:

• Your target market
• Social media sites and the capabilities of each
• Your short- and long-term business growth goals

By carefully weighing each of these factors, you can create a robust social media plan that is specifically tailored to your business and your target audience.

Know your customers.

At the heart of the question of how much time to spend on social media marketing lies a fundamental understanding of your customer. Without an intimate understanding of who you're marketing to, you cannot determine the best methods of reaching them. This will also help you determine in which social media sites to invest the most time and energy. More than likely, many of your customers are spending time on at least one social media platform. Statistics favor of this theory: 30 percent of people across the globe are online, and these users spend 22 percent of the time they’re online on social media. But be careful not to make assumptions based solely on the age of your customers. After all, it's users over the age of 55 who are currently driving growth in social networking via the mobile Web. One of the best ways to learn exactly how and where to engage with your customers is to do some good old-fashioned research. Ask them to fill out a survey and provide them with a reward that’s desirable enough to motivate them to respond.

Where are your customers connecting?

This is another important piece of the puzzle that will help you fine-tune your social media investment. If your customers spend a lot of time on Twitter and LinkedIn but not as much on Facebook, then you can divide your time and efforts proportionately. The trick is knowing how to find out where your customers spend their time. Fortunately, each social media site provides some basic research tools that will help you make this determination:

• Twitter: Use the "Advanced Search" tool to search by keywords and by zip codes to find potential customers, and see how much activity you can identify from these users.
• Facebook: Facebook’s research tools are somewhat limited, but you can check your competitors’ Pages to see what types of posts are the most popular based on the number of “likes” and comments they receive.
• LinkedIn: Use the "People Search" feature to identify key individuals as well as relevant groups that may have a lot of traction with your market.
• Google+: Use Google Analytics to determine the amount of traffic or leads you are getting from your posts.
• Klout: Use this service to see how your followers are responding to your social media activity. Klout can track most major social sites, including YouTube, Flickr and Instagram.

Absolute minimum effort

At an absolute minimum, you should establish a page on each of the big four social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. This accomplishes a number of things. First, by listing your address and basic information on social media sites, you’ll help search engines like Google find your website and list your company’s information properly. Also, keep in mind that customers use all sorts of tools to find you, not just Google. If they happen to search for you on their favorite social site, you want to make sure they’ll find you there. The basic information you should have on your each of your profiles includes:

• Company name
• Company logo
• Website URL
• Customer service phone number
• Brief description of your company

This puts you on the social media map, as it were. You can certainly begin engaging potential and current customers after this stage, but even if you do nothing else, this will at least make you accessible. Then, based on the level of engagement of your target market on each site, you can determine how much more you want to do with each account.

Developing campaigns

Finally, once you've determined that you should do some level of effort of social media marketing, you know which sites are best for your market, and you've developed some basic profiles on each site, it's time to formulate a campaign. Just as with any marketing campaign, you must start by identifying specific, measurable goals you want to accomplish. By doing so, you can then determine how many resources can and should be invested in the process to achieve your desired outcome. For example, you may want to reach a goal of 1,000 “likes” on Facebook in the next three months. This is doable for a company on just about any budget, and you'll know pretty quickly if you need to put more effort into getting these “likes.” If you only have 50 after the first week, then you need to step it up. Some companies frame their desired return from their social media activity in terms of dollars and cents. This is not a bad strategy for the long term, but if you’re just starting out, it can actually be deceiving. Why? Because the work of establishing your brand on any social media network is a time-intensive process. It will take a concerted long-term effort to grow your following to the point where you can achieve significant levels of engagement and have a reasonable understanding of the relationship between your participation and the company’s sales performance. For that reason, in the beginning, it’s often more productive to focus on activity-based goals – such as achieving a specified number of followers on Twitter – rather than on more traditional ROI metrics. So take a step back, determine what sites your customers use to connect, focus your efforts on these sites and set some reasonable, time-based goals for yourself. Then, as you begin to gain traction on a particular social media site and establish a foundational understanding of how well it works for engaging customers and driving profitable traffic, then establish some ROI goals for your top engagement-level accounts.

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