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How To Avoid Cart Abandonment

  • Written By Marcus
  • Posted August 23, 2016
  • 2 minutes Read Time

No-one in ecommerce likes to talk about cart abandonment, but let’s go there anyway. It’s a bad feeling when your Magento site has a customer with a full trolley of products and services, but they don’t actually make it all the way through the checkout, isn’t it? It’s like reading a restaurant menu and getting ready for the meal of your dreams, only to find the chef isn’t in today, or he was only joking.

Fortunately, there are a few basic industry truths that should help you reduce the problem.

For a start, let’s be clear about the number one reason people usually abandon carts at the checkout. Unexpected shipping costs. That’s right. However, enticing your products looked, if the customer finds out at the last minute that getting them delivered to their doorstep is going to cost an arm and a leg, that’s when they tend to think again. At the very least it’s a prompt to get them searching elsewhere for a better deal, and once they have a foot out of that door, you might as well wave them farewell on their way to Amazon… or wherever. Cut your shipping costs to the absolute minimum. Get rid of them altogether if you can.

Shipping isn’t the only expensive surprise that will get your customers unnerved. Avoid doing what some ecommerce businesses try to do by automatically adding extra paid goods and services into the cart without asking. If this was a physical shop, just imagine the effect of the shopkeeping using sleight of hand to drop something into your trolley while you weren’t looking, in the hope you’ll buy it. Even if it looks like a product they might want, its just bad manners. Make buying about opting in rather than opting out.

Okay, but what if there are additional costs that are essential and unavoidable. Perhaps someone is purchasing carpet and they will definitely need underlay. Perhaps they are buying your services and you need to add a service charge. Or maybe they live in Outer Mongolia and free shipping just isn’t a viable option. Fine. Just say so at an early stage.

Cart abandonment can’t be avoided entirely in ecommerce, no matter how good your Magento ecommerce business is, but if you don’t let your checkout be a place where people get nasty shocks you’ll be likely to reduce it massively.