How can you recover abandoned shopping carts in an online store?

Abandoned online shopping carts reduce sales for many online stores. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence, affecting as many as 30% of shopping sessions that are started.

Shopping cart abandonment in online stores is a natural consequence of the growth of the digital economy. Online businesses must expect that a certain percentage of shoppers will abandon their purchases and never return. However, there are ways to minimize the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Why do customers abandon their shopping carts?

There are many reasons for this, and they depend on the store where the customer decided to start shopping. It’s important to keep in mind that people who visit online stores behave similarly to those in brick-and-mortar stores. Sometimes they just want to browse the selection.

However, the situation is quite different for those who add items to their basket but ultimately decide not to make a purchase. What are the reasons why a potential customer leaves the shop’s website without completing their purchase?

Reduce the time it takes to load the website

If your website loads too slowly, users will leave before the content has fully loaded. This sort of inconvenience whilst completing an order may discourage users from going ahead with their purchase.

Don’t let a problem like this cost you business profits. Choose a team of web developers who will create a fast and fully functional website for you.

If you already run an online shop, you should monitor the exit pages shown in Google Analytics. If users are consistently leaving your shop on the same subpages, you should consider what the reasons might be.

Bear in mind that faster-loading pages appear higher up in organic search results. It is worth carrying out a thorough website audit to identify the reasons why the site is running slowly.

Optimise your website for mobile devices

The popularity and availability of smartphones have revolutionised the way users access the internet. Google has noticed that an increasing number of search queries are being made from smartphones.

This is how the Mobile-First Index came about – the biggest change in many years to Google’s ranking system for compiling search results.

Thanks to this, responsive websites are given priority in search results, responsive websites, that is to say those, which display correctly on mobile devices. In view of this, as more and more users are using the internet on smartphones, Your shop should be optimised for making transactions on mobile phones.

Reduce the time it takes to make a purchase

Analyse which parts of your shop are visited by people who land on your website. With this information, you can map out the potential path leading to a purchase. You can also draw conclusions that will enable you to optimise this path in future to increase conversion rates.

Reduce the number of steps required to complete a transaction. There’s nothing worse than having to carry out too many steps before finalising a purchase. Consider also carefully the process of selecting the settings for creating an account in order to make a purchase. Sometimes the need to register an account effectively discourages potential customers from placing an order.

Don’t hide your costs and introduce the most popular payment methods

Given the growing popularity of mobile payments, you shouldn’t limit yourself to simply providing the bank transfer details. Customers who are unable to make a quick payment (e.g. via PayU, Przelewy24, Dotpat or BLIK) may decide not to make a purchase from your shop.

The option to pay via the most popular payment methods inspires confidence in potential customers. In this case, it is also worth mentioning the need to purchase an SSL certificate.

This will ensure that your customers know they can safely provide their details on the website.

Offer a range of delivery options

Customers often abandon their shopping baskets because of unattractive delivery options. Every customer is different – this diversity must be taken into account when planning the customer journey.

For some customers, the price of the service is irrelevant – what matters is the speed of delivery. Others, on the other hand, are happy to wait a few days for their parcel in exchange for lower delivery costs.

What about free delivery?

It’s worth working out whether you can also offer free delivery on your products. If you don’t want to offer free delivery on all orders, it’s worth introducing this service only once the shopping basket total reaches a certain amount.

It’s quite possible that the prospect of saving on delivery costs will encourage your customers to buy an additional product through cross-selling.

Let our agency manage your online shop. We’ll advise you on how to selecting the best solutions for your business. We’ll build a the ground up a responsive website , and we’ll also prepare product photographs and we’ll write unique content describing the range of products on sale.