Cart abandonment is one of the biggest and continuously escalating challenges for ecommerce at present. The cart bounce rate is going up through the roof while sales are going down. Even the biggest shopping season this year has brought about very meager sales and profits for the retailers.

U.S. retailers released stats about their holiday sales growth, which seems to be the lowest in four years. Retailers believe that they were more promotional this year and offered greater discounts than before yet it could not generate additional sales, which they were expecting.

So think about all the labor you did and spent all the time optimizing your website’s landing pages, devising pricing strategies and hot deals to appease customers, and improving your information structure, to better utilize the big data in order to drive up sales and make fat profits. What do you think it actually is that persists as a hurdle in your way to growth and success? Why the cart abandonment rate is constantly rising? And according to a study an average of 67.75% of all online shopping carts are abandoned.

Well in order to perk up your sales once again, it is imperative for you to understand reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Only then you can come up with ideas to resolve the issue.

Following could be some factors that might be causing your customers to leave their shopping carts behind, without making a purchase:

Unexpected Costs Showed Up

Customers buy at retail stores because of the convenience of price discovery; so that they can pick only those items in their shopping carts which will not exceed the budget limit. But at times there are some sort of hidden costs that are not displayed to the customers beforehand. These hidden costs in the form of taxes, card processing fee and packaging fee only surface when the customer is about to check out. So what happens is that the customers, running out of their planned budget, abandon their carts and move on to the next store. In online retail, these unexpected costs have taken the form of shipping charges.

According to a survey 25% shoppers abandon their shopping carts because they believe that the cost of products was unexpected. For 22% customers listing (unexpected) shipping costs, too late was a reason for leaving a cart behind before checkout and 44% said that shipping costs were not just unexpected but way too expensive. What most retailers do, considering their high shipping costs, they try and get the customers interested in a product. Once the customer picks the desired product in his cart, they mysteriously add the shipping charges to the total cost. But it does no good to them. The trick simply annoys customers, who there and then they abandon the cart.

Visitors Were Just Browsing

SeeWhy.com surveyed and analyzed the behavior of 600,000 people and concluded that 99% of the visitors only pore through websites and will never make a purchase on their first visit, whereas 75% of the customers abandon the cart with the intention to buy. According to BizReport.com, 24% of the individuals surveyed, wanted to save money and come back later for value deals. Moreover, 81% online merchants believe that people who are simply browsing websites and abandoning carts on their stores are wasting their time. Now this is the point where ecommerce experts eventually give up and think that free wanderers are not worth marketing for. Besides, lack of merchants’ interest in reaching nomadic visitors with more effective strategies, another reason for failing to encourage visitors to make a purchase on your web store could be your unattractive and not so convincing landing page. If your websites are not interesting, you cannot expect impulse purchase from the visitors and your cart abandonment rate will keep on rising constantly.

Visitors Don’t Trust Your Site

Even if you are a big brand name people would not complete an ecommerce transaction at your website if they don’t trust you. Trust issues arise when people are visiting the website for the first time or they are from the generations who grew up without the internet technology and therefore, they will always have doubts about making online transactions. Thus it is indispensable for online businesses to improve trust factors among prospects.

Customers are Forced to Register

Collecting client details is very important and useful for online businesses to better tailor their marketing strategies and drive sales up. But the general practice has somewhat become a habit of forcing the users to register with the website whereas, most of the people just want to buy and leave. Such sites see a high abandonment rate than others.

Limited Payment Options

With different companies offering several debit and credit cards, customers naturally expect different methods of payments when they shop online. But if preferred or available method of payments is not allowed on a website, 7% of customers will abandon their shopping cart according to Forrester.com.

Checkout Process Was Too Convoluted

11% of customers responded in a survey that they cancel their purchase on an online store if the checkout process seems complicated. This behavior is very likely among customers considering the fact that if something is way too difficult to do then why bother? 80% of the customers shop online for ease and convenience. Therefore, customer convenience should be the top most priority of online businesses. Ecommerce experts should come up with solutions to enhance customers’ shopping experience and provide ease to them rather than fending them off. Asking customers to fill out too many forms or perform too many convoluted or repetitive actions, will eventually force hasty patrons to abandon the shopping cart and leave.

Then how can you battle shopping cart abandonment? Well here we have suggested some techniques through which you can minimize cart abandonment rate.

How To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Following are few techniques which helps you to minimize cart abandonment rate.

Go Transparent

Instead of making people discover shipping charges at some point in the ecommerce funnel, provide them with a calculator right on the product page to calculate the shipping charges themselves, before adding a product to their cart. It will create a superior user experience, and you can position yourself as useful and transparent brand among your customers. Moreover, in a study undertaken by ComScore.com 61% of consumers were likely to cancel their purchase if free shipping was not offered. Online businesses can include free shipping offer, as an incentive for their customers. This is not something out of the blue as customers consider free shipping an integral part of their decision to purchase.

Design Effective Landing Page

Make your websites interesting for the visitors. Provide useful and relevant details, proper Call to Action buttons and place your promotional deals on the site in a way that customers make a snap purchase on first sight. Only attractive websites can keep visitors coming back and develop loyalty.

Improve Trust Factors

Online stores should display security icons prominently. Customers’ testimonials and reviews can be included – for the products in the cart, so as to assist customers to make the right choice for themselves. Moreover, make it easy for your customers to find customer service contact information, in order to clear their doubts in a better way, by answering their queries.

Allow Guest Checkout

It is imperative for online merchants to allow guest checkouts to people visiting for the first time, rather than forcing them to create accounts on their websites. This would only cause the online business to give a miss to free wanderers that may like to make impulse purchase on their web stores.

Send Abandoned Cart Reminders

Online merchants should keep track of useful visitor information and abandoned cart history. With the help of this data, they can send reminders to the customers who cancelled their purchase, and retarget them with a more effective technique so as to encourage them to return to the store and complete the checkout process. You can add personalized ads in your emails and insert coupons and other satisfaction perks to grab customers’ interest and bring them back in your ecommerce funnel to complete the checkout process. Ecommerce experts should also catch on offering loyalty programs to cart abandoners.

Simple Checkout Process

A good landing page for checkout is the one which has only single purpose and a single action to make. Therefore, while creating a checkout page for your website, make sure that you ask the customers only for essential information. Your checkout landing page should not bombard customers with unnecessary information. So try to minimize the amount of information provided on this page. Above all, bring your whole checkout process from several pages down to single page; also known as One step checkout. Making it simple will create a user friendly checkout experience thus minimizing the chances of shopping cart abandonment.

Implement One step checkout

None of the online retailers would like to lose his customers, especially when the customers fill up a shopping cart with products and services and they are about to checkout. This is very likely for websites with complicated checkout procedure, spread over several pages. Fortunately, e-merchants can resolve the issue of complicated and time consuming checkout process very easily, by using various software and applications, which can boil down the whole process efficiently to a single step. For instance online merchants can employ Magento One step checkout plug-in on their web stores. This extension helps in bringing all the checkout steps on one page and the whole process appears on a single landing page. This motivates customers, saves their time leading to immediate increase sales.

Benefits Of One step checkout

• Using One step checkout, merchants can get more conversions as they can provide a rapid and quick processing of transaction to their patrons.
• You can easily and automatically update the fields to generate all the previous information of the customer, keeping your customer from filling in the information again and again.
• One step checkout will naturally boost sales when customers are satisfied and they don’t have to face any issues during checkout. They will not abandon carts and will return to your store for more shopping.

Ecommerce merchants should remember that online shopping experiences should be enjoyable for the customers. They should welcome customers the way they would welcome them on a physical store, and create an environment for them, which the merchants may desire for their own shopping experience. Stores that are cluttered, hard to navigate and filled with hidden costs and forceful registrations would make customers leave before making a purchase. So speculate the reasons causing cart abandonment and consider incorporating features that would resolve the issue before it’s too late. Remember, shopping cart abandonment rate can drop significantly, only if online merchants start solving customers’ problems with their websites.