Navigating How to Tackle Cart Abandonment With a Simple Checkout Solution
Scaling a business today needs a lot of things to be taken into consideration, especially if it aims to run solely online. You not only spent time and money but also creativity designing every product, be it a tangible one or digital. A website is the gist of business planning; you make sure it has a great user journey, copy is on point, and ads bring users to add items to their cart. While everything seems to be going as planned, then poof! You suddenly witness a customer vanish right after adding items to the cart. No checkout, no conversion. Just digital tumbleweeds.
This act of cart abandonment is one of the most frustrating parts for businesses, where they watch their potential buyer turn away in split seconds. It also costs a lot of revenue for e-commerce. The good news is, it's a solvable problem, ending exactly where it begins-the checkout page. Let's break it down.
What is Cart Abandonment?
Your online business is not the only one suffering from cart abandonment. According to recent studies, around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned by users before checkout, which spans across various industries. The percentage is quite brutal, leading to staggering amounts of potential lost revenue for the business every year. However, it is not an impossible task to reduce these cart abandonment rates. With a few UX strategies and a human-centric approach, e-commerce can tackle cart abandonment.
Simple Steps to Ease the Checkout Process
If you want your online store to thrive and see your customer move to the finish line, designing a simple checkout process is a must. It should be so easy that even your grandma could use it with zero help. The entire checkout process should be completed in a few simple steps, including:
- Providing a summary of the cart contents
- Requesting shipping amount and showing payment information
- Show total order summary
- Confirm Purchase
- Close the loop with order confirmation and tracking updates.
- Lastly, provide customer support and request user feedback.
A Detailed Checkout Solution to Avoid Cart Abandonment
Earning closing deals does not happen in a day. You need to understand various details of the checkout phase and consumer behaviour. Here's a detailed breakdown:
1. Forced Account Creation:
If a user has come to make a Purchase on the website, they do not want any other distraction, especially not being forced to create an account for checkout. Businesses do this to gather data, but this leads to unnecessary interruption. According to research, over 26% of cart abandonment happens due to the new account creation process. Businesses still retain customers without asking for a sign-up. Offer a guest checkout option to the customers to eliminate friction. Meanwhile, you can collect user data after order completion as well. Provide options like "get email updates for your purchase", or "track order", etc, to collect their info.
2. Ambiguous Policies:
While making a purchase, customers look for clear details about their product and brand policies. They might stop their transaction journey if they find less clarity over the return or exchange policies of the product they are buying. Every user has concerns about and fears receiving the wrong items, and with no exchange/return on the portal, they wouldn't mind taking a U-turn. It is estimated that over 18% of users abandon their cart due to unclear return or exchange policies. As an online store, a website should have clean mentions of return, exchange, warranty and other related policies. Further, it should provide direction on how to claim their refund.
3. Additional Costs:
Sometimes a business asks for too much in additional fees without realising. These may include high shipping charges, taxes, processing fees, handling fees, etc, which significantly increase the original price of the product that they aimed to purchase. Expensive surprises can be a total turnoff, making the customer rethink their order. This can again lead to cart abandonment.
How can an e-commerce platform avoid that?
Try disclosing all the extra costs upfront at the beginning of the transaction journey itself. Provide compelling discounts, coupon codes and even free shipping to excite them to make higher purchases.
4. Complex Checkout:
One of the biggest user frustrations can be when they have to go through multiple pages and experience a complex checkout. That is what heavily impacts the transaction journey, leading to cart abandonment. Since the checkout page is the most important step in the transaction where the real revenue happens, it should be streamlined and smooth, guiding the user swiftly from one step to another without too much action.
Try to reduce multiple clicks by designing a one-click checkout flow which eliminates switching between many web pages or apps. Additionally, allow customers to link their wallet with the merchant app and pay easily through PIN, biometric, etc on the checkout page.
Conclusion
Cart abandonment is a clear sign that customers perceive your brand or store as inattentive to their needs. They might think that you are only focusing on driving sales. This not only damages all the business efforts and breaks customer trust. Make it welcoming, address all pain points and let your platform say to the customer, 'you are heard'.
Simplify to amplify. That's the checkout mantra!
