7 Proven Ways to Boost Your Shopping Cart Conversion Rate
Have you noticed that potential customers are abandoning their shopping carts right before they complete their purchases? Yes, shopping cart abandonment is a big problem and it can lead to massive revenue losses. Below we want to discuss 7 proven ways to boost your shopping cart conversion rate so you can increase your profits.
What is Shopping Cart Conversion Rate?
Shopping cart conversion rate refers to how many people actually check out of your site and make a purchase. It measures how many people make the purchase once they have put something in their shopping carts, compared to the number of people who may put items in their virtual shopping carts, but don’t make a purchase.
Shopping cart abandonment is a problem for e-commerce websites. People often place items in their shopping carts, but then abandon those carts without making a purchase. This could be due to a number of reasons, so let’s talk about these reasons and how you can increase your shopping cart conversion rate.
7 Ways to Boost Shopping Cart Conversion Rates
Below we are going to talk about the 7 best and most proven ways to boost your shopping cart conversion rates and how to do away with as much shopping cart abandonment as possible.
1. Free Shipping
One of the biggest reasons why people abandon their shopping carts before making a final purchase is due to high shipping costs. People will often place items they wish to purchase in their shopping carts. The price still looks great, but then taxes and huge shipping costs are applied, and it often becomes too much for people to consider paying.
It is a proven fact that free shipping boosts shopping cart conversion rates, and by a lot. It is also shown that free shipping or shipping discounts tend to be more attractive to customers than discounts on the original product itself. Whether or not you want to offer free shipping is up to you.
However, a good idea is to offer free shipping when customers spend a certain amount of money, such as $50. Not only is the free shipping an attractive offer, but specifying a minimum purchase to get free shipping also encourages customers to buy more to meet the minimum free shipping requirement. As you can see, offering free shipping once a minimum price threshold has been met on the original order has more than one benefit.
2. It’s All About Speed
Another of the most detrimental things which causes shopping cart abandonment is a slow website with poor loading speeds. The fact of the matter is that people are very impatient and many just won’t wait for a website to load before they get tired or frustrated.
Research shows that as many as 40% of potential customers will abandon a website or a shopping cart if it takes 3 seconds or more to load. The faster your website is, the faster those images and characters load, and the faster the shopping cart loads during the checkout process, the more likely people will go through with the purchase.
This means that if you are suffering from low conversion rates, if your website is painfully slow, you may want to consider upgrading your hosting plan.
For instance, shared plans, while they are not expensive, share resources with other sites, and when so many people share the same resources, there’s often not enough to go around. Your checkout pages and your site in general should all load in literally the blink of an eye.
3. Using High Quality Images and Product Display Tactics
Customers look at products during the purchasing phase; this is normal. However, many websites also offer a way to look at products during the checkout phase, kind of like a last ditch effort to convince people that this product is right for them.
During the checkout phase, people often second guess themselves and the products they plan on buying, often abandoning their shopping carts or removing items from shopping carts.
Another good way to stop this from occurring is by allowing customers to view those products in great detail, not only during the purchasing phase, but during the checkout phase as well. It is always a good idea to include a clear inventory of what is being purchased in the checkout section, and moreover, people should be able to click on the product, view images from certain angles, spin the image around to see a 360 degree view, and more.
You may even want to consider adding descriptive sales videos of the products during this stage. E-commerce platforms and sales-oriented sites which use high-quality images and videos during the checkout phase have been shown to have much higher shopping cart conversion rates.
4. Account for All Types of Customers
One of the things which often causes shopping cart abandonment is the price of products. A product may seem reasonably priced at first, especially if the customer is looking at a cool product. However, once customers have some time to think the price over, especially when faced with the final price of the product in the checkout section, complete with taxes and shipping fees, people often decide that it’s just too much.
This does depend on the type of product or products you are selling, as well as the type of people buying. Some people have no problems spending money while others can be frugal spendthrifts. It’s not the rich people who have no qualms about spending money that you have to worry about; it’s the spendthrifts who can be problematic here.
A solution to this issue may not necessarily be to lower the prices of all products, but to create a more diverse array of products, specifically in terms of price. If you want the bargain hunters to buy whatever it is you are selling, you need to provide them with attractive prices and good deals.
Once again, this is totally up to you. You may only want to cater to high-end customers, but that said, this won’t do you any favors in terms of conversion rates, particularly with the spendthrifts.
5. A Sense of Urgency
Another leading cause of shopping cart abandonment is a lack of urgency. Many people who put items in their shopping carts do so with the plan of buying them later, not now. As is the case, people are forgetful, and people change their minds.
If you put something in a shopping cart and then wait a couple of days, you might change your mind about the product; you might find a better product somewhere else; or you may just forget about it altogether. This is because there is no sense of urgency.
Creating a sense of urgency goes a long way in boosting shopping cart conversion rates. The “limited time offer” is always good, as well as the “only xx left in stock” marketing tactic also works well. Some people would call these marketing tricks, but if your aim is to make money and boost that conversion rate, these marketing tactics may be worth it.
You want people to feel just a little bit pressured to buy something now, before the great deal expires or before the product gets sold out. Remember though, there is too much of a good thing, so while a little push is fine, trying to force things never goes well.
6. Payment Options
Another reason why people may abandon their shopping carts is due to your site not having enough payment options. For instance, some lower-end websites may only allow their customers to pay with credit cards, moreover, with very specific credit cards such as Visa.
If the customer does not have a Visa credit card, they won’t be able to make the payment. Yes, payment gateways will cost you money, but generally speaking, the more payment options customers have, the more likely they are to follow through with the purchase.
7. Security Features
The other thing to do to increase shopping cart conversion rates is to increase website security in a very visible way. First and foremost, you want to have SSL installed at the checkout and throughout the rest of the site.
Having a high quality security provider and then showing the badges of that security provider on your site will help instill a sense of security with customers. Simply put, people are wary of having their financial information compromised.
Conclusion
There are of course other tactics that can be put to use to increase shopping cart conversion rates, but the above 7 tactics are generally considered to be the best. A combination of all of them is recommended for the best results.