Boost sales by avoiding abandoned shopping baskets

For an eCommerce business, the dreaded abandoned shopping basket gives business owners nightmares! Apparently more than 68% of shopping baskets are abandoned before checkout. So how can you reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase your sales?

Once you know why people are abandoning their cart, you can hopefully do something about it. So why not be proactive in the first place. Have a look at the results from WorldPay and Statista below to see the main reasons people abandon their shopping basket.

So once you’ve done that you can make attempts to stop these from happening! Here are some things you can do about the three main themes that show in the results:

Website

Essentially, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to complete a purchase. This means as few clicks as possible, not letting your website crash and not having the shopping basket timeout inappropriately. A good web designer will help you to create a good website map and good hosting will help to ensure your website uptime is as high as possible. You can also enable Live Chat on your website so that people can get any queries answered immediately so that they can make quicker decisions.

Costs
Make sure all relevant costs are shown upfront so that there are no nasty surprises at the end. Be clear with your shipping costs and any other fees, and always include VAT in the price you’re showing people as they don’t want that shocker when they reach their basket. Try to ensure that if you’re selling your own product, you haven’t listed it with other websites for a lower price.

Payment

People want a secure and simple payment process. PayPal is a commonly offered, and widely trusted, payment method. And if you’re offering card transactions then you need to make sure you have a https prefix to your website URL to show that higher level of security and use a reputable system such as WorldPay.

And if after all of this, they still abandon the shopping basket, there are still ways to get them to convert to sales! The easiest way to be able to follow this up is if someone is logged into their account, or has provided their email address in another way. You can then track if their basket is abandoned and can follow up with clever email marketing and give them some motivation to complete their purchase, perhaps with a discount or special offer. There are a number of tools that can automate this process for you.