With as many as 70% of online shoppers failing to complete their purchases online, there is a lot of valuable business your site is probably missing out on!

Below are 5 common causes of shopping cart abandonment and what you can do to minimize it.  Is your site guilty of any of the following?

1) Hidden fees.  Provide customers with the details of their order up front.  If they get all the way to the order form and see you are tacking on excessive handling charges or unreasonable shipping charges, it will raise a red flag and send them to another site to look for better rates.  You may want to consider offering a free shipping option with minimum purchase.  How many times have you been shopping online and added more items to your cart (that you didn’t even need!) just to hit the “free shipping threshold”?

2) Slow payment processing system.  There are a couple factors to consider here.  First, it is important to streamline the buying process.  Collect only the information you actually need to complete the sale.  You may be trying to collect extra information (such as date of birth or gender) for market research purposes, but worry about collecting that information after you’ve made the sale.  Secondly, the faster customers can make the transaction, the more conversions you will see on your site.  People are impatient and they will not wait around for slow loading pages, so make sure your page load time is up to par!

3) Limited payment options and concerns over transaction security.  Did you know that incorporating a Paypal option (a secure third party payment processing system) has proven to increase conversions between 14-18%?  Consider offering a range of payment options and promote transaction security throughout your site, by displaying trusted seals (i.e. Paypal verified, VeriSign, Entrust, etc.).

4) The visitor is shopping around for the best prices and probably looking for some sort of discount.  This is one of the greatest benefits of online shopping!  Price comparisons from dozens of sites can be done from the comfort of your own home.  Combat this issue by either providing customers with the price comparisons (so they don’t need to go to other sites), offer an exclusive discount or provide some bonus/extra benefit from purchasing from you.

5) The customer has questions before they purchase and cannot find answers.  Implementing live chat on your website would be an ideal solution for assisting customers with questions and alleviating any doubts they may have (especially on the order form, where they have the most questions/doubts creep in).  On average, websites will usually find their conversion rates increase by 10%-30%, after implementing live chat.  If live chat is not a viable option for your site, make sure that you are updating your FAQs with important questions and provide a clear link to make it easy for customer to contact you and check your e-mail regularly.

Posted October 10th 2011 to Internet Marketing • Comments (1)