Thousands of traffic landing on your e-commerce store every day and you still get less than 30% sales?
This is somewhat of a typical scenario for online store owners. Each time you check your website’s analytics and you see the mind-blowing numbers you are doing in terms of traffic. You are always ‘wow-ed’ and want to share this groundbreaking growth.
But is this really growth for your Shopify store?
When what you have to show for your growth is that you gain a lot of traffic to your website. But your website is not for showing great traffic numbers but a goal to make sales in good figures.
The good thing here with the superb traffic numbers you are doing is that you have a chance to convert them to buyers.
I hope you agree that the primary goal why every store merchant setting up an online store for their business is to get sales. Although, the early days of starting an online store might not be all rosy. However, at the barest sales must be made.
To hit this sales point as a Shopify store owner, you need to note the point at which your customers come off the purchase procedure.
Table Of Content
1. Cart Abandonment Rate For E-commerce Stores
2. Reasons For Cart Abandonment
– Order procedures: shipping, long payment process, distance or lengthy delivery days
– Window shopping
– Product and price comparison
– Check the product description
– To buy them later
3. What is Cart Conversion Rate?
4. How Can You Increase Your Cart Conversion Rate
– Free Shipping or Reduced Cost
– Quick To Navigate Checkout Procedure
– Offer Discounts On Items Added To The Cart
– Set Reminders At Intervals
– Create A Sense of Urgency
– Web Usability
– Fast Delivery Procedure
5. Wrap
Cart Abandonment Rate For E-commerce Stores
In discussing the statistics and possible causes of high cart abandonment, we find that certain types of products are more likely to be left in the cart. The items in this category experience cart abandonment because customers window shop for them.
The attitude is, “oh, I like this let me keep it here”.
Another contributing factor is the hot sales season or holiday sales period when there are more people trying to shop online for the holiday period. When you sell online, you need to know that not every visitor to your store, adding items to their carts is ready to buy from you.
While there are a lot of factors for cart abandonment, there are ways you can reduce cart abandonment for your Shopify store.
E-commerce stores are estimated to lose $18 billion in revenue yearly due to cart abandonment.
Many online shoppers who purchase an item might have abandoned a similar product in their cart on a competitor’s site before buying it elsewhere. Statista data shows that about 26% of online shoppers shop for an item they have abandoned in another store from a competitor store.
As said earlier, a large number of online shoppers window shop and keep items they have no intention of buying in their carts. 23% of UK online shoppers have no intention of buying the items they’ve added to their cart.
Other times, shoppers browse online to pick up a particular product in a physical store rather than buying online. Approximately 8% of cart abandonments are due to this reason.
Reasons For Cart Abandonment
There are many reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts. In some cases, you can influence them to checkout when marketing tools are used.
Online shoppers abandon their carts for various reasons from window shopping to product and price comparison to many other reasons. These challenges can be minimized if you can optimize your cart conversion rate.
These reasons may include;
– Order procedures: shipping, long payment process, distance or lengthy delivery days
– Window shopping
– Product and price comparison
– Check the product description
– To buy them later
Baymard Institute in its e-commerce checkout usability research came up with multiple reasons why customers abandon their carts.
What is Cart Conversion Rate?
Cart conversion is the percentage of customers who complete the payment procedure for items in their shopping carts.
The importance of cart conversion rate is to help you know how many store visitors can order your products completely.
With this data, you can know how efficient your checkout process is and where you need to improve if necessary.
How Can You Increase Your Cart Conversion Rate
Free Shipping or Reduced Cost
Quick To Navigate Checkout Procedure
Offer Discounts On Items Added To The Cart
Set Reminders At Intervals
Create A Sense of Urgency
Web Usability
Fast Delivery Procedure
1. Free Shipping Or Reduced Shipping Cost
Offering to deliver products to customers for free or at a reduced cost can help you pull out those who are reluctant about checking out due to shipping issues, from the cart abandonment group.
According to Baymard, the percentage that amounts for these customers is about 50%. If you can find a shipping solution, you might be winning over a substantial part of your abandoned cart.
When the shipping distance is too long or the length of days before ordered items will be delivered is beyond what customers can bear, it can discourage customers from checking out in their carts.
2. Quick To Navigate Checkout Procedure
Considering the fact that online shoppers’ attention can be tripped off if they experience certain hurdles while shopping. To help them focus on completing a call to action on your Shopify store, especially when ordering an item, you need to ensure activities like checking out should not be too complicated.
If about 21% complain about checking out on their cart due to the stringent checkout process. That means you have to examine your checkout process to see if that’s why customers are having issues buying the items.
Incorporate the most uncomplicated checkout procedure. You can even allow customers who do not want to create an account before buying an item the chance to purchase as a guest.
3. Offer Discounts On Items Added To The Cart
Online shoppers love when they hear that a sales event is happening or there is a discount they will gain if they check out on their cart.
Discounts can help you get customers converted to sales pretty quickly. We can say this is the fastest way to influence a customer’s purchase decision. When they know they can save a few bucks, they want to buy.
You can go an extra inch with your discount offers by adding a time limit to them, this way you are creating urgency in buying.
As a Shopify merchant, you can create urgency in buying with a Cart Countdown to set a time limit for the discounts you offer using StoreBundle, a marketing tool available for Shopify store owners.
4. Set Reminders At Intervals
Creating reminders can be done using multiple measures at the same time. Some of the ways to remind customers about their abandoned carts are;
- Email Broadcast
- Cart timer/ Cart Countdown
- Inactive tab message & tab title
Using the tab title each time a customer leaves your page while shopping helps you drag the customers’ attention back to your page to conclude their buying.
This inactive tab message can minimize cart abandonment and increase cart conversion because you can create a more personalized message/title for your tab when customer navigates from your store when on their cart page.
Use the inactive tab message to increase your cart conversion rate by integrating StoreBundle into your store.
Email broadcast works the same way. Personalized emails with attached offers work like magic to influence a buyer to checkout.
5. Create A Sense of Urgency
When you need your customers to buy your products instantly, you need to make them feel and see why they should buy now. That is why sales urgency in marketing products to prospective customers can help reduce the cart abandonment rate and increase sales.
Sales urgency can be created using social proof, cart timer, sold count, short-period sales event, etc. Showing your customers that others are viewing or visiting to check a product would give them a message that if they leave the item in their cart for too long it might be sold out.
The fear of missing out on that product would trigger some customers to check out instantly.
6 Ways To Create A Sense Of Urgency In Sales
6. Web Usability
Having a website that users can easily navigate through is also a factor when it comes to reducing cart abandonment and increasing cart conversion rate.
Ensure that you give your customers a user experience that would make them want to proceed with the transaction and return to buy again.
If a website becomes too complicated to navigate, it turns customers off and they leave your website with no intention of returning. That is why you need to have a well-designed store that is usable and easy to navigate.
7. Fast Delivery Procedure
Order fulfillment is a key part of customer service that can make your customers proceed with buying or not. If you have a rigid and complicated fulfillment procedure, you might have customers just window shopping in your store than buying.
Part of the reasons why customers end up abandoning their carts is the slow delivery process and shipping distance.
There is a laid-out fulfillment procedure for each store, ensure you make yours as minimal as possible so that customers can get their items in the shortest period.
Order Management For E-commerce Shopify Store
Wrap
All these ways of improving sales are to ensure that you create a comfortable environment for your customers to buy.
When customers find it easy to navigate your website, or they get freebies and reasonable offers, you will be able to take off a certain proportion of your dormant customers or visitors and convert them into buyers.
