Did you know almost 70% of customers are abandoning their carts? Even though it’s a scary number, there are still 30% of customers who are completing their purchases, and there are ways to help get that 70% to checkout. A recent Baymard Institute study broke down the reasons why customers are most likely to abandon their carts:
All of these causes are worth researching because they all contribute to cart abandonment, but we’re going to give you tips on three of them to start:
- The extra costs were too high
- No option for guest checkout
- Complicated checkout process
Find more tips for your eCommerce business on our blog!
The extra costs were too high
We know that sometimes it just isn’t possible to offer your customers free shipping or heavily discounted shipping and pay the difference. However, we do have a few tips to help offer your more shipping options, discounts, and how you can save on shipping costs
- Compare different shipping methods
- With carriers all competing for your selected shipping method, you’re able to compare and contrast your options to find the best method for shipping products to customers.
- If you’re using ShippingEasy, you actually have a rate calculator on your dashboard, so you can easily see all of the methods available for shipping.
- Granted, these rates are your ShippingEasy discounted rates/the rates associated with your carrier accounts and don’t affect the live rates on your site. But this way, you’re able to see how much you’ll actually pay for shipments and can adjust your shipping costs and offer services accordingly.
- Offer free shipping over a purchase amount
- If someone is a few dollars away from your free shipping minimum, they’re much more likely to add one more item to get free shipping.
- We know free shipping might not be possible for all of your orders, but offering free shipping over a certain dollar amount or running a special promotion (including a discount) over a certain amount can really push your customer to complete their checkout.
- Consider USPS Regional Rate Boxes
- Depending on which zones you ship to, USPS Regional Rate Boxes might be the way to go!
- You can get free supplies from USPS, and the shipping cost comes from where you’re sending your package instead of how much it weighs.
Try the best way to ship clothes on for size with our blog – What is the Best & Cheapest Way to Ship Clothing?
No option for guest checkout
Having customers signup for an account before they can finish checking out does give you the opportunity to send them emails for your business. However, sometimes, your customers just want to check out in the quickest and easiest way possible. You can still give them the option to input their email address to get updates, but they’ll be more likely to complete their purchase if you then give them the option to check out as a guest.
You can always customize your confirmation emails for guest checkouts with a call-to-action to finish signing up for an account after they’ve checked out. Try offering a special discount or access to a product for members-only to encourage them to create an account after they’ve already made their purchase. List all of the benefits of having an account, such as pre-populated information, first access to products, or members-only promotions as well.
As research from Baymard Institute shows, if you try to make someone set up an account before actually completing their purchase, you could lose 25% of those potential customers.
Complicated checkout process
Like we mentioned earlier, customers are starting to steer towards easier checkouts with no account needed. Are you willing to lose almost 30% of them because you didn’t streamline your checkout process or asked for too much information? You can ease your customers’ checkout woes and make the process as streamlined and error-free as possible by testing your checkout in different browsers and on different computers to make sure it works flawlessly.
Once you have a customer’s business then you can work on building that relationship and get their email address for email campaigns and other marketing opportunities, like a friendly follow-up email.
Conclusion
Put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Would you like multiple carrier options? What about an easy checkout process? If you answered yes to those questions, so would your customers! You can always develop your customer management once they complete the checkout, so focus on getting them to click that button first. Then, you can showcase those creative email marketing skills to keep them coming back.
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Baillee Perkins
