5 Tips to Reduce Online Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is a term indicating the number or percentage of shoppers who place items in the online shopping cart but do not complete the checkout process. Here are 5 reasons why this may happen and suggestions on what you can do to minimize it. These 5 were cited as the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment in a survey conducted by eMarketer.com.

Reason 1: Shipping charges too high. Many shoppers choose to shop online looking for a better deal than what they can get locally offline. If you charge exorbitant shipping, then your price may work out more than what they can get locally or from other online stores. The best thing you can do is to make sure you charge only reasonable shipping rates. It is likely you are using a fulfillment services provider for shipping. You may not have much control over the shipping charges. See how much you can reduce the shipping charges. Talk with your fulfillment provider to see if they agree to scale down shipping charges.

Reason 2: Total cost of purchase more expensive than anticipated. This is similar to reason 1, in which the consumer finds the total cost of the product to be higher than what he would get elsewhere. This may be because after adding items to the shopping cart, you are calculating insurance, freight or taxes which increase the total product price. There is not much you can do about this, other than making sure you are following reasonable rates for insurance and you cannot do anything about taxes. But you can make sure your profit margins are reasonable and not inflated.

Reason 3: Wanted to comparison shop before making a purchase. Many shoppers add products to the shopping cart, only to abandon them wanting to see what the price is in the other online stores. What you can do is to sign up for price comparison sites if you are not doing so already. They ask you to send your product feed in a predetermined format through XML, FTP, etc. They also charge you for each click sent to your site. But shoppers arriving in this manner have already compared the prices with other online stores while in the comparison site itself, so they are lot less likely to abandon your shopping cart.

Reason 4: Could not contact customer support to answer questions. Even if you have 24 hour support, if the customer cannot find it easily, they are likely to abandon the cart. So what you can do is to prominently display customer support email addresses, toll-free numbers, etc. at every stage during the checkout process. You should also consider providing live support online (like using LivePerson.com) at least during business hours.

Reason 5: Forgot login details for store accounts created with the merchants. Usually a shopping cart allows additions and deletions without needing sign-up or login. The session is remembered through cookies and tracking URLs. If the customer has already signed up with your site, then they may have forgotten the login and may find it too much of a bother to sign up again. What you can do is to make sure you prominently display means of recovering both user id and password using a link similar to 'Forgot password?' It is advisable to use email address rather than user id because email addresses are much more remembered, easier to recall, and do not change often.

Finally, it is not possible for you to do away with shopping cart abandonment totally. But you can examine the main causes why it happens and do your best to resolve them to the best of your ability and hope it will increase your business.