Did you know that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is a massive 68.53%? That means more than half the people who proceed to checkout on your e-commerce website do not complete their orders. That’s a huge amount of money to be left on the table, especially when you consider the amount of effort you’ve put into attracting them to your online shop.
So we decided to investigate what factors are contributing to that high abandonment rate, and researched ways that could help reduce it and increase your conversions.
1. 56% abandon shopping carts when presented with unexpected costs
Most of you will think of shipping costs when we’re talking about unexpected costs, as they’re most often presented towards the finishing steps of the checkout process. To decrease your abandonment rate, be transparent about costs such as shipping straight from the beginning by mentioning it on your product pages.
[Tweet “56% abandon shopping carts when presented with unexpected costs”]
Alternatively, you could also offer free shipping. But while we’ve been spoilt by people at Amazon with their free shipping and Prime service – you shouldn’t dismiss offering free shipping because you’re a small retailer, especially when looking at the following statistics below…
(Source: Statista)
2. Average order value with free shipping is 30% higher
One reason why average order value is higher with free shipping can be explained with the second item on the table where 39% often purchase more to get to the minimum threshold for free shipping.
And with 62% of customers choosing the cheapest option according to a UPS study above it’s clear most people aren’t too fond of paying for shipping.
3. 37% are just browsing your online shop
Most of the time we’re window shopping and just looking for nice products we would like to buy in the future. Bur to get people back to your online shop and to complete their order, you may want to do the following:
- Create a retargeting ads campaign
- Use limited time offers
- Enable people to save their “wishlists”
- Send email reminders on special offers
4. Average checkout steps 5.08
In study by Smashing Magazine who looked at the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites from Baymard, they found that it took on average 5.08 steps to complete a checkout.
But while Smashing Magazine found that it didn’t influence usability too much. Having a checkout with 2–3 steps scored the highest in terms of usability.
To help keep your shopping cart abandonment rate to minimum, only ask for essential information from customers and never make fill out the same information twice.
5. Removing distractions increases conversion by 11.40%
Essentially, you’ll want to keep people focused on completing their order, which means anything that distracts them from clicking the “Pay Now” button is a distraction.
nameOn from Sweden tested their checkout page and found that by removing distractions, conversions increased 11.40%.
Here are some things you can remove to keep people focused on the checkout process:
- Remove menu navigation
- Remove all unnecessary calls to action (CTAs)
- Include one CTA to make stand out on the page
- Use the “Clockwork Conversion Wheel” to determine what colour your CTA button should be
6. Every second a customer has to wait reduces conversion by 7%
Waiting for a website to load is like waiting in line to pay for your groceries, and if the queue is too long you’ll start questioning whether those items are actually worth waiting in line for.
The same goes for the online world, where KISSmetrics found that every one second a customer waits for a page to load reduces conversion by 7%!
[Tweet “Every second a customer waits reduces your checkout conversion by 7%!”]
To make sure you’re not losing out on potential sales because of slow loading time, head over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get an analysis and a list of things you can optimise.
Essentially you’ll want to make sure you’ve done the following things:
- Optimise images
- Minify HTML
- Minify CSS
- Minify Javascript
- Get rid of duplicate scripts
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript
7. Shopping cart completion rate lowest on mobile
While mobile traffic is on the rise, data from Formisimo shows mobile cart completion rates are the lowest at 8.5% compared to desktops and tablets at 13.5% and 13.4% respectively, which suggests online shops still have room to improve on the mobile front.
To help increase mobile completion rates, make sure your e-commerce website and checkout is optimised for mobile. You’ll also want to have a payment method which is easy to checkout with on mobile such as a digital wallet.
What are you best tips for minimising shopping cart abandonment? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.
[cta-variant1]
