There is no end to creating great content and offering excellent products when running an eCommerce store. Not only do you need to perform initial market research and analyze your competitors, but you also need to work on your marketing strategy as well as your product quality. At the same time, brand awareness, website quality, and customer support need to be top-notch as well.

But despite having all of this in place, why are you not seeing the kind of conversions you initially expected? The truth is that no matter how unique your products are, customers can abandon their shopping carts even in the final stages of the purchase journey. So, how do you optimize your eCommerce shopping cart to snag a purchase by the customer?

Here is a helpful checklist that you can use for your eCommerce store to minimize shopping cart abandonment.

Why Do Customers Abandon Shopping Carts?

The statistics show that the average shopping cart abandonment rate was over 77% in 2019. It means that more than three-fourths of your customers are abandoning their shopping carts on the very final stage of their journey.

What are some of the main reasons why customers abandon shopping carts? A study conducted by Baymard shows that nearly half of all the carts (49%) were abandoned because of the high extra costs that customers incur, including fees, tax, and shipping costs. 

Other reasons for abandoned online shopping carts included the compulsion to create an account before making a purchase (24%), slow delivery times (19%), long and complicated checkout process (18%), as well as issues with the website and payment methods.

How To Optimize Your eCommerce Shopping Cart?

Let’s go over the different solutions you can implement to optimize your shopping cart and increase your conversion rates. You may face some challenges in setting up all the optimization features, so hiring an offshore programmer to help you would be the right solution to achieve the best results.

Add A CTA Even On The Final Stages

You already know the importance of a good call-to-action in your eCommerce website. However, most website owners overlook having a CTA in the final stages when the customer is about to complete a purchase.

The customer needs encouragement at all stages of the purchase, which is why you need to include a solid and persuasive call-to-action in your shopping cart as well. You can repurpose your old CTAs (if they have been providing you with good results so far), or you can come up with new ones and run A/B tests to check their efficiency. Moreover, by adding CTA to your shopping cart, you can remind customers about the products they were considering on your website and persuade them to extend their shopping list.

Use A Progress Bar

A long and complicated checkout process is one of the primary reasons customers abandon their shopping cart halfway through a purchase. The best way to take care of this issue is by adding a progress bar to your shopping cart. This bar will indicate to your customers how much time is left and how many steps they need to undertake before they can finish the purchase. 

If you have too many steps in the checkout process, you need to reduce the number of steps the customer must undergo. 

Here’s a pro tip: if you cannot reduce the number of steps in your checkout process, you can club two or more stages under a single one to give the customer the impression that the checkout process is more straightforward. It will be beneficial in reducing the frustration that customers usually feel when they see long and complicated checkout processes.

Avoid Asking For Registration

The compulsion to create an account before making a purchase has consistently remained one of the top reasons customers tend to abandon their online shopping carts. You need to provide a Guest Checkout option for your clients to enable purchases without creating an account. The same rule as in the previous point – the simpler it is to make a purchase, the more purchases you will have.

Provide Real-Time Customer Support

Set up live chats with professional representatives to clear common customer queries during the purchase journey. Your clients can go to your customers after they haven’t found some product details or descriptions, and you will not know why.

By providing customer support, you can address and resolve all of the customer’s issues and answer all the questions even before they have had the time to abandon their carts. 

Provide Clear Information

It is essential for your customer to easily access all the information regarding the product you are selling. It will be extremely frustrating if the customers cannot understand the process clearly or cannot decipher the product details in a cart. That is why checkout page optimization is necessary. You need to provide all information about the product, including the size, color, and description so that your customers do not have to keep turning back from the cart to check all the details. 

You should also include an option to allow your customers to change the product details in a cart. For example, allowing your clients to adjust the size of the product in the shopping cart will reduce the rate of cart abandonment.

Include Different Payment Methods

You need to cover all kinds of payment methods (including both traditional and digital payment methods) so that your customers can purchase with whichever banking options they wish to use. Provide them with the most appropriate payment methods they may choose to use: credit card, bank transfers, e-wallet, mobile payment, cash on delivery, and even cryptocurrency. You should also include convenient payment options like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc.

You may need to hire a developer to help you set up all needed payment options, but it is well worth the effort.

Save The Products In A Cart

Sometimes, it becomes inevitable for something urgent to come knocking at the door when customers are shopping. Naturally, customers are going to leave their carts and forget about their shopping. However, they usually come back later. In such cases, your clients might get frustrated if they are required to go through the whole process of selecting their desired products once again.

Therefore, it would be helpful if your customers can save the products in their cart so that they can come back to your website later and complete the purchase.

Winding Up

Why spend all that time and effort creating a great product only to have it abandoned by your customer halfway through their purchase? Optimizing your eCommerce shopping cart is the best way to boost your product sales and increase conversion rates on your website. Incorporate the above checklist into your eCommerce store, and you will come out of this process with flying colors.

Author’s bio

Iryna Bilyk is an expert content marketing manager who works at YouTeam – a marketplace for instant engineering team extension. She passionately discovers and writes about technology, innovations, and software development solutions.

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