While good sales volumes are essential to the success of any eCommerce enterprise, a large percentage of online stores tend to record poor sales figures partly caused by shopping cart abandonment.
Understanding what stops customers from buying and giving it a fix is therefore, key to improving your ecommerce sales.
We take a look at five common sins that may be stopping customers buying from your store;
A Complicated Checkout Process
A difficult checkout process will result in customers abandoning their shopping carts and not returning to buy from your site. Avoid lengthy order forms, information entry requirements and forced registration.
Ease the checkout process by including a guest checkout and automatic entry of repetitive information like shipping and addresses.
Poor Navigation
Ease of navigation enhances user experience, creating an easy journey towards a purchase. An eCommerce site with a bad browsing experience makes it difficult for customers to discover products and makes for poor on-site experience.
For a great navigation experience, include faceted navigation on your online store so visitors can narrow down to the right products faster. Facets and filters highlighting important parameters like price, brand and colour choice make it simpler for visitors to make a purchase.
Good menu structure with drop-downs helps visitors find products with less number of clicks and can convert browsers into buyers by leading them to popular categories from the home page itself.
A landing page for deals and discounts can also be useful for better navigation as it will allow users to browse through all discounted pages at one place.
Hidden Transaction Fees
After spending their precious time choosing products and loading a shopping cart, being slapped with unexpected extra charges will make visitors abandon their carts before checkout.
Hiding costs will result in your store losing credibility because no visitor is willing to spend their hard-earned cash on a dishonest brand.
In fact, 56% of online shoppers identified unexpected costs as the main reason why they abandon their shopping carts at checkout.
If your store has an unusually large shopping cart abandonment rate, perhaps it’s time your re-evaluated how your display charges. You can achieve this by displaying shipping and any other extra costs on the first page of your store so as not to unpleasantly surprise shoppers at checkout.
Reviews or Recommendations
Every seller online or otherwise will always vouch for their product, but whether the product is efficient will depend on what customers have to say about it.
With no reliable means of testing products before buying online, consumers have come to depend on product reviews to ensure they make the right decision.
Use real reviews form past customers to avoid being perceived as deceptive. One great way of getting reviews is asking for them from customers or incentivising users who leave product reviews or recommendations with discounts on the next purchase.
Lack of Trust
The whole concept of online shopping is based on trust. Shoppers need to trust your store well enough to provide their intimate credentials like payment details and delivery addresses.
Ensure that your eCommerce platform is PCI compliant and clearly display trust symbols such as Visa or Mastercard. Give your business a physical location by prominently displaying a physical address and phone number. This assures your visitors and removes any trust issues.
Provide a money back guarantee and a clear returns policy to avoid any misunderstandings with customers.
Remember to leverage social media. Social media is extremely useful tool for winning customer trust. Research shows that 85% of online shoppers refer to one social media site before shopping online.
Quality, regular updates on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can help build a good reputation for your brand. Ensure you regularly engage customers by asking and responding to questions.
Delivery Issues
Unexpected delivery costs are the main reason why shoppers abandon seven out of every ten shopping carts. According to Statista, cart abandonment usually occurs when shoppers encounter something they did not expect like extremely high courier charges.
Do you want to build a winning eCommerce site? Get in touch with Out of the Box Ideas, a Johannesburg based web development company offering customer-oriented IT consulting, ecommerce, web and mobile app development services.
REFERENCES:
https://wemakewebsites.com/blog/7-e-commerce-sins-that-stop-customers-purchasing
https://www.statista.com/statistics/457078/category-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/