Regardless of what it sells, an e-commerce website can be a powerful tool for any business that has a product they want consumers to buy. Since this type of site can be accessed by potential customers from all over the globe, businesses who launch an e-commerce site often expect their sales to skyrocket.
While a quality site can definitely increase sales, that doesn't mean it's a silver bullet. There are issues that even the best e-commerce sites still have to deal with. The most significant of these is figuring out how to minimize shopping cart abandonment.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
When someone first comes to a site, they're just a visitor. However, if the buyer adds a product to their shopping cart and start the checkout process, most businesses assume they're going to become a customer. Although that's a reasonable assumption, it's not how things actually work.
Even after starting the checkout process, many people will never finish the transaction. In fact, the average abandonment rate across all industries is 67%! If a business forecasts its sales by how many people start checking out, they would end up with less than half the sales they expected. Since that's a huge difference, any improvements you can make to your site will help. Here are two proven ways to reduce abandonment:
Don't Obfuscate Important Details
You never want online buyers to be surprised in a negative way. While a special discount that lowers their total is good, anything that boosts the price is bad. For example, if shipping and handling causes their order total to be far higher than the website pricing they saw earlier, consumers aren't going to complete their purchase.
The best way to avoid scaring buyers off is to make any additional costs clear ahead of time. Using the shipping and handling example, it's a good idea to put a shipping calculator on each product page so visitors can see just how much it will cost them to get it delivered.
Eliminate Unnecessary Fields
If a business wants to increase the number of people who sign up for their email list, the first thing any consultant will tell them to do is remove all but two fields. In fact, some experts prefer to remove the name field and only leave one field for an email address.
When it comes to processing payments, you have to collect more information in order to ensure it's a legitimate transaction. But that doesn't mean you have to require page after page of fields. For example, if your shopping cart supports registration, don't require users to sign up prior to checking out. Instead, wait and give them the option to sign up once they've successfully completed the checkout process.
About Author: Aaron Walker is a tech enthusiast who loves sharing tips and tricks about gadgets, social networks, and the like.
Matt posted on - Monday 8th of July 2013 06:40:35 AM