Ecommerce made easy
Friday, 15 April 2011 00:00
Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce specialist Actinic, reveals 13 proven ways to avoid abandoned shopping carts.
Abandoned shopping carts aren’t necessarily negative. Visitors quit their carts for many reasons.
They may be competitors checking out your site, or consumers comparing prices and finding out your trading policies. Equally, customers may use your site and then place the order by telephone.
On the other hand, shoppers may quit because they find your checkout too complicated, or because they can’t find a next-day delivery option.
The following tips will help you minimise unnecessary abandonment and encourage consumers to complete their purchase and buy again.
BUILD TRUST AND MORE TRUST
Provide your contact details throughout the site, including a telephone number and physical address. Promote confidence, respond quickly to emails and answer the telephone professionally.
KEEP YOUR SITE SIMPLE AND EASY TO USE
Divide the site into logical sections, with clear navigation links and a link to the home page on every page of the site. People generally expect navigation links at the top, left and optionally bottom of the page. Give full information with each product. Provide a search facility and make sure customers can get from home page to ‘Buy now’ button in the minimum number of mouse clicks.
COMMUNICATE YOUR SHIPPING COSTS EARLY IN THE TRANSACTION
Everyone hates surprises on cost. If the customer proceeds to checkout and decides the postage is too expensive, you have lost the sale. However, to justify a single postage charge, a customer may buy more than one product.
EXPLAIN YOUR GUARANTEE AND RETURNS POLICY
A rock solid guarantee goes a long way to persuading people to buy. You must explain the distance selling regulations seven-day right of return in any case, so why not make this a strong selling point? Note that if you do not inform customers of their right, their rights are automatically increased by law.
DESCRIBE YOUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS
When people can’t find information, they tend to assume the worst. Go out of your way to provide comprehensive buyer friendly information. Make your site one that you would like to buy from.
EXPLAIN YOUR PRIVACY POLICY
Provide a clear statement about how customer’s data will and won’t be used. A clear statement that customer data will not be passed to third parties except to complete the order process will help a lot.
EXPLAIN YOUR SECURITY AND ENCRYPTION PROCESS
The best way is to use a Payment Service Provider (PSP), which will have gone through a rigorous certification process. You can then state that no card data will be stored on your site. You can also purchase a security certificate (SSL certificate) for your site, which will give you the golden padlock when people check out. Your ISP or web host can advise you how to set this up.
CATEGORISE YOUR SITE CONTENT INTO ATTRACTORS (WHAT PEOPLE LIKE) AND DETRACTORS
For your own planning purposes, try to minimise detractors (ad popups, need to register before buying, and so on) and at worst balance them with attractors.
EXPERIMENT
Different site layouts and options can have a dramatic and unexpected impact on sales. For instance, one site reported a 20 per cent increase in revenue after they added PayPal as a payment option. Another reported a 50 per cent reduction after they prominently added the ability to input a voucher during checkout. People who did not have vouchers were obviously put off.
A further site discovered that sales grew 14 per cent when customer reviews were made available. Experimenting is important because each site will have slightly different visitor demographics - meaning that the people who visit different sites will behave differently. So you need to do your own trials.
REMEMBER CUSTOMER SERVICE IS KEY
Encourage repeat business by going out of your way to meet customer needs. Happy customers will tell their friends, but unhappy ones will tell anybody who will listen.
BE AVAILABLE
If customers cannot find out what they want to know from your site, they may try to get in touch with you. If they are unsuccessful, they will expect the same difficulty if they ever have a problem with an order - and they will go elsewhere.
MARKET TO ABANDONED CARTS
If your ecommerce solution can support this, contact people who have supplied their details and then abandoned their carts. There can be many reasons why people have abandoned their order, including technical problems, running out of time or issues of trust. Many businesses have found that this strategy can lead to significant increases in order volume. Contact can be by phone or email, and may involve an incentive to complete the order.
ANALYSE YOUR SALES FUNNEL
Look at every step in the process, from arriving at your site to completing the checkout. Understand where people are dropping out and brainstorm ideas for correcting the problem. Then test alternative approaches and measure again, so you can retain what works.
This is just a sample of the advice for selling online from Chris Barling. The full book of over 300 tips for running an ecommerce website is available as a free PDF at http://www.actinic.co.uk/top-tips
Written by Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce and EPOS systems specialist Actinic. Originally published on Sports Insight Magazine.