Providing a shopping cart option on your website is a great way to induce your customers to buy, especially when you want to induce them to buy multiple items. However, according to Baymard.com, a whopping 66% of people who shop through shopping cart enabled websites eventually abandon their carts. This can be frustrating not only when you want to make a sale, but also when you want to gather data about what people are truly wanting to buy on your website. It’s difficult to say which purchases are truly popular and which ones are just fancies and impulse buys when they’re all sitting in an abandoned cart together. Fortunately, there are some things you can do as a website owner to fight shopping cart abandonment.
Offer Free Shipping
Shipping is expensive. When you’re offering many items for sale that are large, bulky, or heavy to send, you may be tempted to hike up the price of shipping in order to cover your own costs. However, if you do that, according to an e-Tailing study, you’re simply raising the prices of a hypothetical. 44% of online customers, according to a Forrester survey, abandon their shopping carts because prices for shipping are too high or weren’t clearly marked. This is a massive incentive to offer free shipping, if you can manage to work out a deal with your local postal service.
Show the Hidden Charges
Many website owners believe that the best way to get people to buy their product is to make it look as cheap as possible. In order to do this, many websites do not advertise hidden fees such as sales tax until the very end, right before the payment occurs. In this case, many buyers are taken aback and immediately abandon their carts. A good alternative is to advertise the actual price of the item on the website, and proudly announce that there are no hidden costs to be revealed at checkout through your WordPress shopping cart. Customers are more likely to buy if they think they’re getting a good deal, and much more likely to run away if they have the slightest inkling that they’re being taken for a ride.
Remind Your Customers About the Cart
Your customers might honestly want to buy everything in their carts. However, for a variety of reasons, they might be unprepared to buy those items exactly when they’re shopping. It might be just as simple as not wanting to get up and move across the room to get an inconveniently-located credit card. Or, it might be because the customer is expecting a paycheck soon, and is sitting on the thought of what they’ll buy until then. Either way, the customer is likely to forget it, as well as your store. One of the best things you can do in this case is automate an email. Whenever a cart goes too long without being attended, send an email to the user (if they have an account), and let them know that their items are still ready to be purchased. You may be surprised by how well this works.