If you run an online shop, where people drop their carts like crazy, then the first thing you need to know is that those situations aren’t uncommon at all. 

In fact, more than 60% of all carts get abandoned. 

The good news is that you don’t have to spend dozens of hours studying your audience and the entire market to address that issue.

(You should be doing that in parallel)

But before you do all the legwork, first check out the most common reasons for cart abandonment. 

This way, you can pick the lowest hanging fruit(s) and increase your website conversion before you start making more significant strategic changes in your business.  

So let’s look at a few of the most common reasons why buyers drop carts and how you can prevent it: 

• Shoppers need to register to buy. While it’s ok to entice people to register and get some special treatment (a bonus, a discount, some sort of a privileged membership)—it shouldn’t be a requirement. Those few minutes that set them apart from getting that item they liked at your shop are often enough for their buying impulse to vanish as quickly as it appeared. 

• Your prices are too high, or you use fake discount tactics. Online shoppers (especially gen Z) are very online shopping-savvy. They won’t overpay even by a dollar if they know they don’t have to. So increasing prices to pseudo-reduce them later, may put you out of the ring quickly. 

• No Comfort of having different payment methods. If you’re not offering PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay or Google Pay —you might be leaving serious money on the table.

• Long delivery time.  That might be an issue, especially when Amazon is just one click away. So,  if your supply comes from China, make sure you always have enough of it stocked. Also, you can incentivize higher order value if you offer free shipping starting from a specific price. 

• The customer journey is too long. Clicking through multiple pages and confirmation in order to finish checking out won’t bring you more fans. If an extra step that could easily be discarded takes 5-10 seconds of my life—guess what? That’s enough for me to dismiss you as my new favorite shop. 

• Your website was put together by a hardcore geek with a passion for coding and 0 user experience (UX) empathy. Perhaps even worse, you put it together yourself or used some fancy theme that made it 5x slower. Well, the user interface (UI) is not something to be sneezed at. If your website is unintuitive, difficult to browse, and has a complicated customer journey (see the point above)—I’ll have it easier somewhere else. Unless the stuff you sell is so exclusive, one couldn’t get it anywhere else. But is that the case? 

So, Oscar, what if you have all those things in check and it still doesn’t convert?

This may be a sign of some deeper issues, such as wrong offer or the traffic you send to your website. But this would be too much to cover here so I won’t do that. 

Now, if you feel like your store’s health (traffic, website, ad campaigns) needs a thorough check-up —you might want to have the best ecommerce doctors look over it. We will help you set it on the right track and get clarity on how to bring your revenue to the next level. 

https://salesgenomics.co.uk/mike/