Basket abandonment is a real problem in eCommerce and one many digital marketing experts are constantly trying to fix. With statistics that show only 2% of online shoppers convert it’s easy to see why so many business owners are obsessed with fixing this.
With 90% of people abandoning baskets or window shopping, there’s a huge potential to increase profits. Just lowering basket abandonment by 1% can have a dramatic effect on the sales of a business. How do you do you lower basket abandonment?
The Right Content at the Right Time
A good PPC agency understands the need to provide the right content at the right time. It may be tempting to lead those who click on a little journey, so they see more products, but this will only lead to frustration. Google users want products they searched for instantly, and they won’t appreciate being made to jump through hoops to get it. They’ll simply shop elsewhere.
Provide Clear Direction
All of us are quite lazy when we shop online and if the checkout button isn’t screaming at us, we will forget it’s there. There are areas of a webpage we never look at, such as the bottom left, and so placing a checkout icon here, is basically asking a customer to abandon their basket.
There’s a reason the basket, or cart, is usually in the top right corner. This is the area on a website where people scan the most. This is why the phone number of a company is here (for smaller businesses) or the shopping and login icon for larger brands.
Customers still need prompting though. The longer a person dwells on a webpage the more chance there is of an outside distraction that will stop them from checking out. This is why you need to scatter reminders and make it easy for them to navigate through the checkout process.
Make it Time Sensitive
Many of the bigger brands make the checkout process time sensitive. For example, some big grocery retailers understand basket abandonment, and so will give a person 2 hours to shop before they have to rebook a delivery slot. Most people, even though it’s a simple click to book again, will fear losing their slot and will checkout in the allotted time frame.
You don’t need a countdown, you can simply remind the customers of the benefits of checking out quickly. For instance, “checkout within the next hour to receive your product tomorrow.”
Be Transparent with Prices
A few years ago some companies thought it would be fun to hide the delivery prices until the final stages of checkout. For some reason, they believed that once a customer got to the point where they were ready to pay, they would accept the delivery charges without question. This rarely worked. Customers are not silly, they don’t like being lied to, and even if the charges are minuscule, they don’t appreciate an attempt to fool.
Being completely transparent is much more likely to encourage a customer to check out, while also building consumer loyalty which is the gold currency of eCommerce and digital marketing.
It would be foolish to attempt a basket abandonment rate of 0% as there are circumstances beyond your control that can prompt a visitor to abandon their basket. This being said, it’s always crucial to improve on basket abandonment rates and to discover why the customer is leaving the site on a certain page. To win at eCommerce and digital marketing a company needs to constantly adapt and evolve to please the changing internet landscape.
Author: Nicole Levings
