Are potential buyers at your website abandoning their shopping carts? The problem is endemic in the online retail industry, but it doesn't have to be that way. All you have to do is make it easy for customers to buy from you -- and that means improving the shopping cart experience at your site. Keep reading to find out how.
Internet retailers work hard to get prospective buyers to visit their e-commerce websites. Hard earned dollars are spent on marketing, promotions, search engine optimization, and advertising to bring the targeted customers to the website. Site design is improved to provide ease of navigation and to display the offered products to their best advantage. Often forgotten in the shuffle is the lowly shopping cart.
A badly designed and difficult to use shopping cart will undermine all of those other efforts to increase visitor traffic and improve sales. All too often, e-commerce website owners shrug their shoulders and either dismiss the problem as being trivial in the total amount of sales lost, or believe that little can be done to solve the abandonment problem.
The cost to an online business in lost sales resulting from leaving the shopping cart in mid-transaction is not trivial. Industry estimates vary, but many e-commerce insiders believe that approximately 75 percent of all shopping cart transactions are not carried through to completion.
In other words, only one out of four customers who want to purchase a website’s products and services ever complete the purchase process. Even a minor improvement in the conversion rate to 50 percent abandonment represents a doubling of total sales completions. The problem is definitely not a trivial one.
The other concern is that little can be done to change or improve the shopping cart buying experience to increase the sales completion percentage. That fear is without foundation. The good news is that many low cost and highly effective improvements can be made to an e-commerce site to enhance the level of sales completion.
The techniques might not represent huge changes individually, but when taken together they can double or even triple the total sales volume of an online business. Each improvement represents a slight incremental increase in sales transaction completion. As each technique saves another sale from abandonment, the effect on the business bottom line becomes very noticeable.
Perhaps it’s time to take the lowly shopping cart a bit more seriously after all.
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