Are abandoned shopping carts giving you fits? Customers can change their minds about checking out for any number of reasons, but you'd be surprised at how many online retailers make the checkout process more difficult than it needs to be. Keep reading for some helpful ways you can improve your site's shopping cart design and hopefully increase sales.
Sometimes humor makes the point best. You'll find the points I raise here illustrated at The Oatmeal. The artist created screen shots for a “typical” shopping cart and provided some lively commentary on what was wrong with it at each step. Before you say he was just doing it for effect, let me add that I've encountered most of these problems myself with one shopping cart or another. So have you, in all likelihood – and so have your customers; if not from your cart, then from others. Let's make sure you're not adding to their frustration, okay?
Every shopping cart includes certain fields that customers must fill out. At the beginning of the form, you must tell your customer in the clearest, easiest-to-read font, colors, and language, not only that certain fields are required, but how they will be marked. And then you must mark those fields as clearly as possible. If you're using an asterisk, make sure it is large and bold. Using red helps, but it should still be large and bold; some people are colorblind, after all. If you think it's not important to be crystal clear here, consider how frustrating it would be to submit a form and have absolutely no clue why it isn't going through.
At this point, many shopping carts ask the customer to create an account with a user name and password. You're no doubt hoping that your new customer will be a repeat customer, but right now they just want to get through this transaction. They may have no idea whether or not they'll be back – and asking them to create an account just to buy something adds too much pressure.
Don't believe me? Take a minute to count how many online accounts you possess. I don't know about you, but I got up to 15, and I know there are some I've forgotten. I don't want to keep track of one more. Unless it's absolutely critical that your customer create an account, allow them to use some form of express checkout or Facebook Connect.
As to the password, you can encourage them to use something strong, but consider carefully how insistent you want to be about it. Some sites will not accept passwords that are too weak, but if you force a customer to use a strong password, you could annoy him enough that he'll abandon the checkout process. Strike a balance between security and ease of use.
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