In my previous article, I discussed a number of features you can include in your e-commerce website's shopping cart to help reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment. With holiday shopping here and online shopping cart abandonment rates around 75 percent, I thought you'd appreciate more tips to help get your customers all the way through the checkout process.
As with the previous article, I've drawn these tips from the very awesome infographic created by Monetate and picked up by Search Engine Land. While the earlier tips focused specifically on shopping cart features, in this article I'll be looking primarily at aspects of your website that shoppers will find before they even get to the first page of your cart. As Monetate did, I'll present my tips in the form of “dos and don'ts.”
We'll start with a few things that you shouldn't do. And the first of these will probably drive you crazy. Do not force shoppers to register before making a purchase. It doesn't matter if it's free to register; it doesn't matter if all they need to do is fill in a form with their name and their e-mail address. Someone shopping in a brick-and-mortar store never needs to part with personal information, so don't force your customers to do it until they're ready – and usually that won't be until there's a good reason. In a shopper's mind, putting an item in a shopping cart isn't a good reason to part with personal information. From their point of view, you as the seller don't need that information until they're paying for the product and telling you where to ship it – and not a second sooner.
For online shoppers, it's more than just an annoyance to be asked to register before making a purchase; it's grounds for going elsewhere. Monetate mentioned some tests conducted by Jared M. Spool of User Interface Engineering on this topic. Spool found that “75 percent of people who were forced to register first never tried to purchase,” according to Monetate. “In one case study, customer purchases increased by 45 percent after forced registration was removed.” Let shoppers check out as a guest. Let them see for themselves that your products and customer service are top notch; then, when they do get around to registering on your site, they won't resent you for it, because it's their idea and you didn't force the issue.
The second thing you should not do is hide shipping costs. In my previous article, I mentioned that one of the top five reasons customers list for abandoning shopping carts is that the shipping costs turn out to be too high. Intellectually, customers know that they have to pay shipping costs, but they don't see those costs when they shop at brick-and-mortar stores, so they aren't used to it. So do not wait until the last minute to include shipping costs. You could list them on each product page just under the product's price, as a reminder. If it makes financial sense, you might also consider offering free or flat shipping to your customers. The key point is to make sure your customers are well aware of shipping costs going in. Nobody likes this kind of surprise.
The third thing you should not do is offer coupon codes unnecessarily. Many shopping carts feature a spot for users to type in a coupon code. If a shopper sees that, they're liable to leave your shopping cart and start searching for coupon codes for your website elsewhere online. This isn't a small issue; Monetate notes that one study saw a 90 percent decrease in conversion because of “faulty coupon code placement.” This doesn't mean you can't offer a coupon code entry form, but you should only present it to customers “who are offered a promotion on their way into the site,” according to Monetate. “Otherwise, it's best to hide the field and replace it with some subtle text like 'Do you have a promotion/coupon code? Click here...”
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