Designing to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment

If your search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising campaigns are working according to plan, you have no problem bringing potential customers to your site. You understand what they are looking for and know how to reach the right people online. You realize the importance of targeted marketing and do whatever you can to keep your site’s traffic rate growing. It’s too bad the story doesn’t end there; we all wish that having enough web traffic would be enough to sustain a business for the long term. If that were the case, most businesses would have no trouble at all. However, there’s more to the story, something even more important than the number of visitors a site receives, something many business owners overlook during the website creation process: conversions.

Online, a conversion is a visitor who fulfills the ultimate purpose of a website. For a retail site, that purpose may be making a sale or getting more social followers; for a charitable organization that goal may be receiving donations or volunteer applications; for a blog it might be to growing newsletter subscribers or making affiliate sales. In any case, it’s the desired end result of a website visit.

For online retailers, this is where shopping cart abandonment comes into the picture. Shopping cart abandonment occurs when a visitor who started to fill an online shopping cart leaves the site before completing their transaction.

Shopping Cart Abandonment: The Numbers

This is a big issue for eCommerce sites. If you are experiencing high numbers of abandonments, the problem may lie with how the experience is designed, but where do you start? Since the best way to overcome a challenge is to face it head on, understanding where you stand is important.

• According to a recent study by Baymard Institute, the average eCommerce website faced abandonment rates of 67.44%.
• The estimated total of annual lost revenue due to shopping cart abandonment is $31 billion for 2013. Ouch!
• On mobile devices, the shopping cart abandonment rate jumps to 7%.

These numbers make the case increasingly urgent. Shopping cart abandonment not only affects businesses in a real and measurable way, it also is on the rise. Check out a few of the strategies below to decrease the abandonment rate on your site.

Make Extra Costs Clear

Your visitors want the ease of shopping wherever they’re comfortable and whatever happens to be the most convenient. In many cases, this is not in your brick and mortar store. For this reason, many visitors may come to your site to keep the process simple and to get what they want fast. Based on this, why would they fill a shopping cart and then leave?

In many cases, it has to do with the clarity of extra costs (processing, shipping, and sales tax) that were not made clear from the start. By providing flat rate or free shipping, and making that perk clear from the start, you ensure that your customers know what to expect in the first place. The design of your site will make or break this function. Use your homepage to broadcast shipping rates or add links to each product that clarify any additional costs.

By clarifying extra costs from the start, you ensure that your customers know what to expect in the first place. The design of your site will make or break this function.

Best Buy is a reigning champion when it comes to clarifying extra costs. Not only do they make their free shipping deal abundantly clear on the homepage (a $25 minimum to Amazon’s $35 minimum for regular, non-Prime, shoppers), but they also advertise a price match guarantee, and even let you calculate estimated sales tax before you check out. If you spend under $25, they also estimate the shipping. This way, it is clear before you proceed exactly how much you’ll be spending.

Organize Your Site Like Your Store

Customers don’t want to experiment with hundreds of keyword combinations in your search bar before coming up with the one that brings them to the item they’re looking for, especially when they have something specific in mind. They want the process to be easy and to be able to navigate your website like they would navigate a brick and mortar store. You should make fonts easy to read and use colors that are complementary to different categories.

Think about your site’s overall design and layout. How does your theme layout the items you have for sale? Are they organized by categories? Can customers browse certain categories and subcategories, making it easy to find specific products? If not, you could lose a number of shoppers, even after they’ve added an item or two to their shopping cart.

Well-known wild animal control brand Havahart makes it easy to find their humane animal traps, repellents and other items, and organizes products by category. Shoppers can look in an overall group or sub category to find the product they’re looking for without any barriers. Breadcrumb navigation makes it easy to get back to a broader category, just as walking down a specific aisle would present you with related products. And once you select a category, you can filter down your results by animal or brand to better find the exact product you have in mind.

Having the sleekest design out there won’t do your site any favors if your visitors don’t know how to move around it; simple navigation makes it easy to draw connections between the way you find things in a store and the way you pin them down online. If your site does not allow for shopping that mimics in-store experiences, you should consider a redesign.

Make Your Customer’s Shopping Cart Obvious

A visible shopping cart that makes the number of items clear and the price easy to find means your shoppers won’t face any unexpected surprises when it’s time to check out.

Design-wise, this is simple. Place a shopping cart icon at the top of your page; when a guest adds an item to it, draw attention to it by displaying a thumbnail of what was just added, or by updating the price or number of products. Allow shoppers to click on the cart to see further details, and be sure to have a checkout button on every page.

Here at Medialoot we have a few pre-designed shopping cart solutions that can do just this.

Snyder’s Furniture, an Amish furniture outlet in Lancaster, PA, uses this design feature to its advantage. At all times, a widget in the right column shows shoppers recent additions to their cart as well as a running subtotal. As shoppers fill their carts, they’re able to track their purchases with ease, eliminating any check-out surprises. When they’re ready, they can click the red checkout button to complete their purchase.

Take Advantage of Persistent Cookies

Looking for yet another shopping cart enhancement? Use persistent cookies to store your visitors’ shopping session. These cookies allow the site to remember shopping cart contents for when a customer returns. This eliminates any frustration involved with having to find all of the items that were selected during a previous visit. In addition, since big online retailers all have this feature in place, your customer is probably already expecting it to be there. Most shopping cart systems allow this feature; ask your eCommerce provider or web developer to enable it.

Using cookies like this provides all kinds of advantages. In addition to saving your customers’ incomplete orders for later, you can email them a coupon to entice them to complete their order, or alert them when an item goes up or down in price, like Amazon so helpfully does:

The innovative things Amazon does with their shopping cart could fill a book, but these are some of the more easily emulated features.

Provide Online Shopping Advantages

With the right layout, you can make it clear to your customers that shopping online, on your site, is their best option.

With a few well-placed, brightly colored sales announcements — online exclusives — you can draw attention to the fact that there are direct advantages to shopping on your site. Do not wait until customers start browsing. Instead, use your homepage to broadcast online sales.

Ceramcor uses neon blue and green banners on top of each sale product on the homepage to make it clear that their ceramic cookware is affordable from the start. The final price of each item is highlighted under a shot of the product alone or in use, and each highlighted product proudly displays a star rating and reviews if it has any. What better way to evaluate an item at a glance?

Evaluating Your Own Site

When you’re looking for ways to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates in order to increase your overall online sales, design should be your focus. Take an honest, unbiased look at your current site, or ask friends for their candid feedback. Imagine yourself as the customer. What holds you back? What is annoying, hard to find, or frustrating? What features could you incorporate to solve those problems?

Online shopping experiences should be enjoyable. Think of the way you welcome customers to your physical location, if you have one, or your own desired shopping experience. If a store was cluttered, difficult to navigate and filled with hidden fees at the register, you’d probably leave before making a purchase. Online shopping is no different.

Think about the design elements of the sites used as examples above, or of sites where you’ve made purchases in the past. Look for ways to incorporate those features into your own site. Your shopping cart abandonment rates could drop dramatically if you start solving your users’ problems with your site.

What improvements have you made to your shopping cart, and what results have you seen? Share in the comments below!