A checkout usability study by the Baymard Institute, shows that 69% of online shoppers drop their cart and abandon their willingness to purchase goods from an online store. This means that they cease their role as a buyer and that in itself is a problem for the rising ecommerce industry.
Thus, begs the question, why are customers abandoning their carts? This article strives to share some reason behind this relinquishment as well as provide some additional insight.
1. The site is too slow
Buyers tend to be quite impatient when trying to access a store’s product. They may have seen the product from a Google shopping ad, it piqued their interest and so they clicked. If a site is too slow, the buyer may find it tedious and decide to leave the store.
Moreover, they may not have reached the point of dropping items in their cart, seeing as opening pages and receiving information from the servers is exhaustingly slow. This makes the buyers unhappy and unlikely to revisit the store.
It is recommended to procure the services of a company that has the professional background of providing solutions to this problem. The problem being, low bandwidth. One such company that offers a solution to this is cloud VPS hosting with unlimited bandwidth.
Furthermore, cloud solutions are at the top of the chain when it comes to handling large loads of customers visiting the site and assigning the necessary resources to each online customer. This is a catalyst in reducing the percentage of online shoppers that abandon stores.
2. The lack of bonuses offered by your store
Bonuses refers to additional incentives that prompt the buyers to go all the way until the checkout point. These incentives may vary but they do include: free shipping, sales, deals or discounts and giveaways. These incentives should also be in bold and well highlighted in the store.
Online shoppers are moved by the thought of saving money and these incentives invoke that thought process.
These incentives will also boost sales and reduce the number of customers leaving the store and increase the number of cart checkouts.
It is also advised to use these bonuses carefully as they have a probability of reducing profits. Balance should be achieved in order not to tip the scales of sales versus profit. A suggestion would be to have these bonuses in a seasonal manner depending on the type of ecommerce site you are running.
There is a reason why Black Friday is one of the most anticipated times of the year, especially for buyers who look forward to these types of sales and discounts.
3. Insufficient information
The willingness of a buyer to purchase your product may lie heavily on the descriptive information you provide about your product. There are some fundamental rules that product descriptions should follow. Although this is highly dependent on the type of product being offered. But essentially, buyers tend to look for:
- Its features, both big and small
- What and how exactly it will solve the buyer’s problem
- And other benefits it offers to show its uniqueness, to urge the buyer to buy a one-of-a-kind product that suits their needs.
Product information is also important in this day and age due to user preferences. Some users are vegan and tend to buy products that are vegan friendly. This is also dependent on the niche your product is targeting.
Apart from product information, charitable information could also invoke the buyer to procure the product. If some of the product’s profits go back to a community or cause and this is mentioned in the site, this can move the buyer to purchasing the product as it is for a good cause and this may increase the likelihood of buyer checkouts.
4. A complicated checkout process
Having a user-friendly website means that users can easily navigate throughout the modules of the website. Moreover, having a human centered design behind your website allows for users to feel at ease while accessing the services availed by your store.
If the checkout process is difficult to maneuver through, a buyer tends to give up and move on to the next task that will take up their time and unfortunately that might not be your site.
There are user inhibitions when having a long checkout process because buyers will find this process tedious. If the checkout process is too complicated, buyers will simply close the tab.
It is necessary to have an iterative process testing, whereby the checkout process is continuously tested, with test samples, in order to remove any arising issues that may deter the user from procuring the product. This will solve the issue of time and intricacies.
5. Customer support
Customer care is an important asset to have in an online business. It is considered irreplaceable due to the lack of face to face in online stores. Having a completely AI reliant customer support will deter any current or future buyers.
There will always be issues that may arise from customers and it is your job to ensure that customers are served quickly in order to solve them.
Because of the different nature of online shoppers, there are some ways to allow them to have access to customer care.
- Providing information on how customers can reach customer support as well as the standard reply times. This is to get rid of any expectation’s customers may have.
- Having customer support on multiple channels such as social media channels or email is a great way to show inclusivity.
- Having FAQs at every avenue in order to answer any questions that may have been asked before. Issues arise frequently, but so do repetitive issues.
