How to Reduce Cart Abandonment in your Business
Imagine going to the supermarket, filling your cart with all the items you want to buy, and then finding a line at the register that is so long and slow, that you prefer to just walk out of the store empty-handed, leaving behind your full cart.
That would be the real-life equivalent of something that plagues every single online store: Cart abandonment. Different statistics put the percentage of abandoned carts anywhere between 65% and 81%, some even making it to 90%, and these unfinished purchases are not only a loss of revenue – after all, they are failed sales- but also clutter your online store’s servers.
But fear not. In this post, we are going to learn a bit more about the most common reason people abandon their carts in your online store -something that may not even have anything to do with your store at all- and how Stage Try’s multiple tools can help you minimize this unavoidable problem and improve your online store’s sales and revenue.
Why do people abandon their carts in online stores?
While each customer is potentially a different reason to abandon a cart, knowing the most common causes can help you reduce the number of lost sales in your store, by keeping your store free from them so you can recover a lot of customers and close a lot of sales that otherwise would be lost.
The most prevalent store-related reasons for people to abandon their cart seem to be: complicated checkout processes, hidden or unexpected additional fees, and unpleasant “surprises” during the checkout process like registration requests, email capturing tools, or similar.
Other common reasons are slow or buggy pages, pages with no safety certificates, complicated return policies, and having to re-enter their billing and shipping information for each purchase.
What to do to avoid cart abandonment?
Keeping your store ready to make the shopping experience for your customers as smooth and pleasant as possible is not as hard as it seems. Stage Try’s “Try before you buy” button is the perfect solution for most of the main causes of cart abandonment, and joining our platform gives you access to many tools that can help tackle others.
Our “Try before you buy” button makes the checkout smooth and quick, giving your customer not only the opportunity to try your products but also simplifying the return policy, so they feel more secure when they are buying.
Add our $0 checkout, with no hidden fees or unforeseen expenses, and you have a process that is as transparent as possible, with a simple to understand and follow return policy, neutralizing the three main causes for cart abandonment and allowing you to reduce this problem as much as possible in your store.
Offering various payment forms is a good technique to keep the customers’ intention to purchase, as is having a clear and strong call to action (CTA) on your checkout page; and what better call to action than “Try before you buy”?
It offers your customers this amazing possibility of seeing the products first hand, touching them, wearing them, and deciding if the quality is good enough for them (and we are sure your amazing products are more than enough even for the highest standards) and having the option to not keep the product, send it back and not get charged for it at all, which simplifies the process by not involving a refund and a complicated return policy with tons of exceptions.
Being part of Stage Try is more than just the “Try Before you Buy” button. It also involves a series of tools you can use to contact your customers and give them that slight nudge back towards their cart and towards finishing that purchase.
When contacting your customers to get them to complete their purchase, remember to tell them clearly who you are, what’s the name of your store, what you offer, and what they had chosen to buy. Telling them what your products can do for them is only half the battle because timing is also very important for these follow-up messages.
If you send them too soon, like right after they leave the cart, then you’ll look desperate, but if you wait too long, the memory of visiting your store will be long gone from the customer’s mind. The general recommendation is to send them between 6 and 8 hours after the cart is abandoned.
And no need to worry about capturing email addresses for this because Stage Try gives you a database with the information of all your customers and followers, which also simplifies the process for you too.
Cart abandonment is an unfortunate reality that online stores just can’t escape, but with all the Stage Try tools -our “Try before you buy” button, the $0 checkout, and the customers database- you can slow it down and reduce it to the minimum, converting as many carts into sales as possible and driving your online store to the success you’ve always dreamed of.
