Customer Experience
The customer got to the site. They found the items they wanted and were happy with the price. They made a selection… and then quit. Someone called them for dinner. They were looking for a credit card and got distracted. They intended to go through with the purchase following their next payday but forgot.
The question is: why? And what can be done to encourage shoppers to clear that last hurdle?
Although customers report a number of reasons for leaving items in their cart, they can be comfortably grouped into three categories: nasty surprises at checkout, becoming bored or, in the end, not trusting the vendor not to take the money and run.
A surprise at checkout - usually extra costs or lack of options - additional things that the company had not disclosed at the beginning.
According to Splitit, a payment solutions company, fully 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts if they find checkout is too complex, and more than half say they would avoid the retailer in future. More than a quarter said the problem was a long checkout process.
A long checkout with a poorly-designed user interface can lose customers not just by being frustrating, but also by seeming unprofessional, or even illegitimate. Consumers may be inclined to take their business elsewhere. The data provided by Salesforce shows that, of those who abandoned shopping carts, almost one-fifth decided at the last moment that the website was suspicious, and wouldn’t trust their payment information with the business.
Run regular analytics and remain on the pulse with developments in UI and payments: recent regulations or popular new providers, for example. Website crashes, performance issues, and lack of mobile-optimisation can drive customers away, but are all eminently fixable.
Finally, when it comes to upselling: find a balance that is helpful, before becoming pushy. Upselling should assist customers in finding related, relevant products - not foist extra things on them. Excessive upselling can scare otherwise satisfied customers away, or even project a sense of greed.
It’s also simply not popular among consumers: only about 15% of customers actually want to hear about other offers when they’re already making a purchase, according to MarketWatch.
The most effective of which is perhaps the humble follow-up email.
Figures from marketing software company Moosend show that 40% of these emails get opened, half are clicked on, and a further half go back and make the purchases they abandoned at first. Put simply, following a short email enquiring after an abandoned cart, businesses found that around 10% of those customers ended up coming back. A brilliant return, given the minor expense involved.
Finally, it’s worth noting that not every abandoned cart represents a failure. Sometimes it saves an expensive headache. Retailers with large, important items - like furniture - should expect a portion of cart abandonment to represent consumers in a process of research and deliberation: experimenting with options and leaving the site to conduct more research, before making a purchase.
There is a risk that they end up buying from a competitor while looking around at different options. Potentially lost business could be recovered by providing that information on-site, and giving customers the ability to experiment with colour, texture, fabric, for example, online.
Cart abandonment is sometimes an easy fix. Sometimes it is bad UX, neglecting certain options or flexible policies. Other times it’s quite nuanced: providing the right information at the right time to secure the sale. The most important thing is to be clear and upright with customers - and not try to squeeze as much value out of every transaction as possible. That’s the customer’s job.
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