How to stop shopping cart abandonment

It’s easy to get upset once you discover that your online customers are placing items in their shopping cart, then clicking away. This is known as an “abandoned cart”.
It happens for many reasons: customers comparing prices, competitors checking out your site, shoppers finding the site difficult to use, people browsing and then ordering by telephone. So abandoned checkouts aren’t necessarily negative to your home business.
 
Try these ways to encourage consumers to complete their purchase.
 
Build trust
Some people are nervous about shopping online, particularly if they don’t recognise your name. So provide your telephone number, email and physical address, perhaps a photo too. Respond quickly to emails and answer the phone professionally.
 
Site design
Ease of use is key to navigation: get a friend to test the site. Use common terminology like “About us” and “Online shop”. Don’t make people create accounts; many won’t want to. Don’t use images for the sake of it. Make the checkout process as simple as possible. Ensure that you don’t use over-complex technology which adds nothing but cost, and slows the site down unnecessarily.
 
Delivery costs
Display the P&P upfront. If the customer gets a shock at the checkout, you risk the sale. But they may buy more than one product to justify the postage charge.
 
Ts & Cs
Explain terms and conditions clearly, particularly your guarantee and returns policies. For non-perishable products you have to obey the Distance Selling Regulations anyway so make a big point of offering a no-quibble seven day return.
 
Provide payment alternatives
Let people order by mail, fax or telephone as well. For payments, obviously you should take cards, but adding PayPal can increase orders by up to 10%. New methods such as PayOffline (where people make a physical payment at a local shop before receiving the goods) may also up conversions by a few percentage points.
 
Security and data protection
State clearly how customer data will be stored and used. Use an SSL certificate so when people check out, the “padlock” appears. Use a Payment Service Provider, such as Actinic Payments or Sage Pay, to protect card data under the new banking security standard, PCI DSS. Consider enrolling in one of the schemes to reassure buyers such as ISIS (Internet Shopping is Safe) or SafeBuy.
 
Manage expectations
You need to make sure that customers know what to expect. If you state “normally ships in two to three days”, they won’t be too upset if it takes four days. If you offer “24 hour delivery”, when does the period start? Be clear about any time cut-offs, for example “orders received by 4pm normally ship the same day”. If possible, over-deliver on your standard and if you can’t deliver in time, contact the customer to explain.
 
Customer service is tops
Encourage repeat business by going the extra mile. A happy customer will tell their friends, but an unhappy one will tell everybody who’ll listen including moaning about you on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
 
Measure everything
Use a package such as Google Analytics to pinpoint if there is something wrong with your site. Ecommerce allows you to try things out, measure the impact and then adjust as necessary. If you don’t do this, you will miss out on a lot of business.

 
By Chris Barling, chief executive of ecommerce and EPOS supplier, Actinic
www.actinic.co.uk