Table of Contents
1 Surprise Shipping Costs
2 Security Concerns
3 Lengthy Checkout Process
4 Poor Website Performance
5 No Coupons or Offer Codes
6 Lack of Customer Support
7 In Conclusion
The end goal of any eCommerce business is to ultimately sell their products successfully online. eCommerce businesses want to ensure that they mitigate any bottlenecks which may prevent customers from finalising their purchases. Unfortunately, it commonly occurs that some customers add the products they want to the shopping cart, but fail to reach the checkout process. Shopping cart abandonment is a situation that eCommerce websites want to avoid.
This blog will highlight several reasons why customers decide to abandon their shopping carts, as well as ways to prevent this from happening.
Surprise Shipping Costs
Customers generally have a budget when conducting shopping online. Because of this, they take great caution to ensure that they don’t need to make unnecessary expenditures. Unexpected or expensive shipping costs can be a major deterrent to checking out. With about a quarter of customers stating unexpected costs as the main reason they don’t complete their purchases, it is key that you avoid this.
A great way to do so is to ensure all possible costs are explicitly stated. Many eCommerce websites feature cost ranges for shipping on their product pages. Moreover, it can be ideal to mention any extra costs that might be incurred fully on checkout pages. Even if your shipping costs may be expensive due to your courier process, displaying all expected costs clearly will mitigate the likelihood of shopping cart abandonment. Another solution is to simply remove any exorbitant costs, however this may not always be an option
Security Concerns
Customers strongly care about the safety of their living and financial information. With eCommerce growing larger everyday it means more people are choosing to shop online. By doing so, they risk exposing credentials to the threat of malware and more importantly online hackers.
It is important that the portals you use on your eCommerce website for payment processing are securely encrypted. You want to ensure that the payment process for customers is secure. We advise using a high quality fraud detection system to guarantee security.
Lengthy Checkout Process
Another reason why eCommerce websites experience shopping cart abandonment is due to a long checkout process. Customers simply want to select the product they are looking for, go to checkout and complete their purchase. If there are too many pop-ups, information or other miscellaneous content clogging up the checkout process it can deter customers from completing their purchase. However, you want the process of shopping on your eCommerce website to be efficient and convenient for your customers. If you want to mitigate bottlenecks in your customer’s checkout journey, aim to reduce the steps needed to reach checkout. The longer the process the more likely customers will abandon their shopping cart. Additionally, you want to minimise the amount of data they need to enter. Too many requirements for customer information can make the process exhaustive and even raise security concerns for them.
Poor Website Performance
In addition to factors such as unexpected shipping costs and long checkouts, poor website performance can harm customer’s shopping experience. Bugs, long loading times and crashes can all deter customers from checking out. Furthermore, this can lead customers to going to other competitors eCommerce websites. Even if these website issues are minor, they can be enough to affect the customer’s shopping experience.
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Ways to prevent these issues is to ensure your site undergoes constant maintenance. Checking for faulty plugins and other backend errors can greatly improve website performance. Also if possible try to optimise your shopping cart. The more streamline the checkout process is, the more conversions you will receive.
No Coupons or Offer Codes
All customers love a good bargain. For customers that chase deals, it is important that they are able to capitalise on some form of offer to mitigate their shopping costs. A lack of these on your site can be a possible deterrent for online bargain hunters.
Ultimately, if there are no offers then some customers will simply shop elsewhere - which you want to avoid.
A possible solution to this is to add auto-apply coupons to baskets. Even if it’s a small 10% in the checkout basket this can be beneficial to retaining customer’s interest.
Lack of Customer Support
Customers want to be confident that they can receive help when required when shopping online. For many customers, FAQs and help centres are a necessity when shopping on eCommerce websites. If there is no avenue for queries to be answered or staff to help with a potential issue, then this can be decisive in customers continuing to checkout. Customer support is a big thing and needs to be acknowledged, even more so as an eCommerce business.
You should seek to implement live chat boxes on your site where customers can chat to staff about any concerns they have. The benefit of these chat tabs is that they can be streamlined into the design of your site without being in the way. You can include them at the bottom corners of your site so that it doesn’t distract customers when shopping, but they’ll be aware of it for when they need it.
In Conclusion
Customers abandoning their shopping carts is an unfortunate scenario that all eCommerce stores seek to avoid. It is important to consider the factors that can lead to this event and aim to prevent them. Factors such as security concerns and unexpected costs are few of many reasons why customers don’t complete their purchases.
Where possible try to optimise site security and focus on the customer experience. This approach can help ensure that customers continue to checkout and complete their purchases.
