You put a lot of work into your online store. From securing payment processing to designing a solution that works best for your company, you deserve to see your efforts pay off. More consumers fill their shopping carts digitally than ever before, and you’re perfectly primed to accept their business.
So when they abandon your website with items left in their shopping carts, it can feel like a slap in the face. You’ve done so much to win their patronage, but for some reason they’ve decided to back out at the last minute. This will always happen to some degree, but if it’s a common occurrence, you may have a problem with your website. You can usually solve these issues with a simple tweak, but you need to be precise. Changing everything at once won’t help you isolate the cause of this abandonment, so you could make the same mistakes over again.
Thankfully, this article has a few helpful tips that may resolve your dilemma. These simple suggestions are relatively easy to implement and should help you retain online shoppers who might otherwise abandon their carts.
Don’t Stand in the Way of a Purchase
Think of a purchase as a race your customer has to run. They want to get from start to finish as quickly as possible. Now think of your checkout process as a series of hurdles. Every new request for information is an obstacle that a customer must clear to get to their destination. Too many roadblocks will frustrate your customers, and they’ll leave for another site that offers them more convenience than yours does.
The key to guiding an online shopper through your checkout process is to only ask for what’s necessary. Shipping details, contact information and credit card data are all essential components of a purchase, so those should stay. But if you’re giving people surveys or obtrusively asking them to join your mailing list, you may be chasing away valuable business.
Don’t Skimp on Design
Streamlining your checkout process is important, but you also need to prioritize your online store’s design features. If buttons are too small, text is confusing, or a page looks downright ugly, users are going to get confused or disgusted. You need to orient your pages so that they flow neatly into one another. Customers are much more likely to buy when they can actually understand the information you give them, and design plays a crucial role in facilitating this.
Keep Your Website Running Efficiently
Picture this: your mother’s birthday is coming up and you want to buy her a present. She lives in a different town, though, so you decide to buy her a present online and ship it to her address. You find an artisanal gift from a small business and proceed to the checkout. You’re about to pay, but the site becomes unresponsive. You refresh the page and it takes five minutes to reload. When you finally enter your credit card information, the site crashes. Does this sound like a pleasant shopping experience?
Just one of the problems listed above can send online shoppers running. You need to make sure your pages load quickly and aren’t prone to crashes if you want to prevent that from happening.
Invest in Your Customers’ Security
Online shoppers take a risk when they buy from you. They’re putting their identities and credit card information on the line, and if you can’t guarantee their safety, someone else can. Make sure they see your security credentials when they go to checkout, and work with a qualified payment solutions provider so that your customers remain uncompromised.
