A quality e-commerce site is more and more essential as we dive deeper into the digital age, because who isn’t online these days? The ability to shop quickly and efficiently from the comfort of your home or with the mobility of your phone is becoming less of a novelty and more of a necessity as consumer needs evolve, which means that each aspect of your e-commerce site needs to work together seamlessly to create the best consumer experience possible.
Although you may have already read about the 7 must-haves of an e-commerce website, such as desktop-to-mobile adaptation and fast web page loading, it is still easy to become a victim of low e-commerce conversion rates. One of the dominant reasons?
Cart abandonment.
What Causes Cart Abandonment?
It may surprise you to learn that by the end of 2017, the average rate at which a consumer abandoned their cart before making a purchase was 81%. That translates to four out of five shoppers leaving their carts before purchasing. With so many consumers opting to shop online, you might be wondering how the abandonment rate could be this high, but also what is causing it? Here are the top 3 reasons for cart abandonment:
Login Headaches
Nearly 38% of cart abandonments occur at the checkout login stage. This stems from one of two reasons:
- There is too much information required to complete the login and subsequent checkout process.
- An account login is required to make a purchase.
If they are a first-time visitor to your site, there is a good chance that a consumer will want to check out as a guest and see a successful outcome before committing to having an account with you. Not providing this option can be a turn-off to consumers and result in a loss of conversions. If they are not a first-time visitor and still have to input all of the same information each time they generate a cart, this can also result in increased cart abandonment.
Lack of Shipping Cost Transparency
In a perfect world, there would be no costs for shipping, but what’s worse than having to pay for shipping is not knowing that you’re going to have to do so or how much the cost of shipping will be. A whopping 46% of cart abandonment happen at the payments stage, and almost 36% of cart abandonment happens once shoppers see shipping costs.
Security Uncertainty
Knowing that your site is secure is a big motivator for finishing a checkout, particularly for first-time shoppers. Without a visual guarantee that your site is secure and able to protect consumer personal and payment information, chances of cart abandonment occurring will increase.
Avoid Cart Abandonment on Your Site
There are a number of reasons why cart abandonment occurs, but there are things you can do to decrease the level of abandonment on your e-commerce site. For every cause of cart abandonment, there are just as many ways to either prevent it or stop it from happening again.
Keep the cart visible, because it’s harder to forget what you can always see.
Allow guest checkout, because no one wants to be forced into friendship.
Be upfront about shipping, whether you offer it for free or not.
Make the process fast, because too many pages make for too much hassle.
Be accessible to your customers, because when they can chat with you or find all the information they need before and during checkout, they won’t need or want to stop the process.
Above all, be transparent, because a lack of trust will send customers running away from the finish line rather than towards it.
There are many hurdles to get over when developing your e-commerce site, which is why it’s important to work with a partner that has encountered these hurdles in the past and has developed strategies to leap over them.
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