People love to shop, but that doesn’t really mean they’re always buying 😜
Over the better part of the last decade (2010-2020), the average cart abandonment rate during checkout was 41%.
Long before they even get to checkout, the majority of shoppers who visit your store won’t end up buying from you. Everyone thinks that last sentence you read doesn’t apply to their brand though… But in 2018, the data revealed a whopping 79.17% of shoppers just browsed, added an item to their cart, and then left without making a purchase. Those numbers are high 👀.
In other words, for every 10 shoppers with at least an item in their cart, about 8 of them will leave your website before completing their purchase.
The reasons for a high cart abandonment rate are everywhere, and not sharing credit card information due to privacy concerns at the checkout page is one of the largest and most common. The overall general news cycle is filled with stories of monster credit card fraud involving sensitive information and large scale internet scams. So it’s natural for shoppers to be wary the first time they shop at your store. Admit it, you’re skeptical when you shop too. We all are. Sometimes more than others but in general, we can all relate. It’s not so fun being on the wrong side of fraud. Nope. I want none of that please and thanks.
When shoppers are doing their shopping, they aren’t really sure if your business is legit, your address is real, or your payment process is safe. We just all do go through the motions of paying for things online with such convenience that we put a lot of faith in merchants who haven’t done much to exactly earn that trust. Chalk it up to habit and human behavior. But when you really drill down, shoppers don’t automatically see signs telling them that they should trust you and buy from you. The signals are always more subtle than that, but in many instances, they don’t exist altogether. Even when your product will fulfill a user’s needs, they will still hesitate. That’s where Consumers Digest provides your business unparalleled value. Unless you give users signals to trust you and feel comfortable making a purchase from you during their buying journey, they are left to form an opinion about your brand on their own and ultimately make a judgement call on whether to buy from you or not. This is revenue for your business or a missed sale. Knowing this information, why would you suffer missed opportunities to close sales you’ve worked so hard to earn? Why would you cannibalize your marketing budget and paid advertising strategy on the one yard line? You wouldn’t 😂!!! Instead, build out your trust strategy and flash healthy, relationship building signals to your shoppers while they get to know your brand. Remember, you are building a business here. Invest in your trust stack.
In this article, we will dive into effective cart abandonment solutions we think your business should test out. Reducing the number of missed opportunities/sales throughout the buyer’s journey is absolutely a key lever you’ll want to pull in order to increase overall revenue for your business.
Some common reasons people abandon their cart:
- Extra costs are too high: Nobody likes surprises at the end of their shopping experience. You think you’re paying one price and then the shopping cart checkout page hits you with some interesting extras. Extra costs usually consist of taxes, shipping and delivery fees. While you can’t do anything about taxes, you are in control of your shipping/packaging costs and you can change them to benefit your customers. Though this may cut into your margin, various studies have proven that free shipping can increase conversions by as much as 90%! You will also gain intangible good will with your target audience(s) which can be measured through various eCommerce metrics.
In order to eliminate or drastically reduce these often hidden extra costs that can hurt your brand, you need to carefully calculate your costs (fixed and variable), cash flow and revenue to make room for free shipping. If your business can manage this well, you’ll watch conversions, margins and top line revenue skyrocket. After all, people clearly care about free shipping. And if you provide it, don’t make them wait to find out; let them know immediately.
- Shoppers don’t trust your site: Online fraud is at an all time high. Over the last five years, reports indicate that more than $18 billion was stolen from over 15 million U.S. consumers and unfortunately, this number keeps growing every year. With all the news about hacks and breaches (think Equifax and Facebook in recent years to name a few), it should come as no surprise that security issues are a primary point of friction for customers. In response, your job is to prove to your visitors that they can trust buying from you. One way to mitigate the risk from the very beginning is by adding a security trust badge on your page. Below are some generic SSL (Secure Socket Layer) trust badges commonly seen throughout the internet.
Unlike many trust badges out there in the digital eco system, SSL badges cannot just be copied from another resource or even made yourself. You literally can copy and paste other types of trust badges and post them to your site. In our opinion, that renders many trust badges meaningless, unfortunately. They might look good and have you fooled but that doesn’t make them worthy of your trust. But, if your business is looking for a legitimate security certification, your store must be verified by a third party. This is where Consumers Digest steps in to help you out. Our verification process is straightforward with an incredibly quick turnaround. We audit eCommerce websites to make sure they are displaying the utmost trustworthy signals, policies and information, effectively eliminating some of your visitors’ biggest concerns at every stage of the buying journey.
- Delivery too slow (tough in this current supply chain environment): Even though your delivery service is most likely outsourced, customers will hold you accountable for it. If you’re facing problems with your delivery vendors, it’s worth considering a switch. Unfortunately, everyone in the world has fallen victim to strained supply chain issues during much of the entire Covid era dating all the way back to early 2020. Companies that are not in control of their supply chains, and we get it, that’s kinda hard to do, have been some of the heaviest hit. If the Coronavirus pandemic has shown a light on anything in this space, it’s that companies that own many, all or enough parts of a vertically integrated supply chain process, are the brands less affected by supply chain disruptions. This is certainly not a solution for every business as it can be incredibly expensive to vertically integrate, but the data over nearly two years of living with Covid has shown us that companies that are less reliant on other parties for product delivery, are able to weather the supply chain issues quicker and more effectively than companies who are completely at the mercy of the current global logistical mess at hand.
In a pre covid world, however, research suggested that unreliable shipping can be one of the biggest detriments to your business. Seriously – one study found 40% of shopping carts abandoned if delivery estimates were 8+ days. Add trust badges on your website and your visitors will know that there will be no delivery issues. If these types of trust badges aren’t for you because we think having too many can make your beautiful site look a bit cluttered, there is no harm in proudly displaying your shipping policies on different parts of your website. If your operations are running smoothly, don’t be shy about it! Emphasize your speedy deliveries right on your product/checkout pages or maybe take the time to create entirely separate pages with their own links, dedicated to showing your customers that your policies are 🔥!
- Returns policy: 30% of all products ordered online are returned. Read that again. You can look for the roots of this problem all you want and chip away at what your research uncovers until you are blue in the face. We strongly encourage your business to periodically audit your site to see what’s working and what isn’t. You absolutely should work to improve your product quality, the product images, your lead gen strategy, your email flows, your target marketing, your social channels, etc. The harsh reality is that some percentage of your goods will always be returned. That is just the law of eCommerce land.
In order to minimize returns, your business needs to go above and beyond at each stage of the customer journey to reassure your buyers that the shopping process is painless before they even make their purchase. Tell them exactly how much time they have to make a return. State that information very clearly and prominently on the home page. Try posting it on the product page, in the product description and on the checkout page as well. Transparency in this form is a hedge play for your business against the chances something unforeseen in the future possibly goes wrong, leading to a return. A trust badge, statement or even a whole document guaranteeing a warranty or refund policy instills a desired sense of security for shoppers and it costs you very little to let your users know that they are in good hands.
- Lack of payment options: Though the vast majority of online shoppers have credit and debit cards, there are plenty of people that prefer alternative options like PayPal. If a customer has a favored e-commerce payment method, he or she will expect to be able to use it with your store. If you offer only bank card check out, it may be worth looking into PayPal as well as some other trusted options. And for the methods you do offer, it can help a lot to display the options visually.
We will get into different payment options and solutions for your business in the next section but it is so important in today’s world, with so many payment choices at our disposal, that merchants provide a healthy variety of options for customers to choose from. Nothing pisses shoppers off quicker than a lack of ways to pay for the product/service they’ve committed to purchasing. Don’t be that company that loses the sale at this stage because you’ve fought so hard to acquire it. See it through to the other side where you can test out all your post-purchase flows and keep nurturing that relationship.
Keep reading below for some good examples of lowered cart abandonment rate strategies we’ve seen work IRL…
Ensure your brand is prominent and trustworthy
The truth is, many merchants overestimate the level of trust their customers feel towards their business during an online shopping experience. If the conversion rates are healthy, the AOV is trending in the right direction, there’s often little motivation to take consistent temperature checks on the underlying behavior of your customers. There’s even less appetite to segment this behavior out across different ICPs (ideal customer profiles). In doing so, you also are cutting off incredibly valuable data for your business that can help provide insightful context as to why the metrics are reading the numbers you’re seeing. Research shows that trust has a huge impact on customers’ intention to buy. But trust is considered mostly intangible, meaning non measurable. When trust is high, shoppers are more likely to enter their payment information and complete the checkout. When trust is low, they leave a store without a second thought.
But for online business, building trust at checkout isn’t that easy. It’s because customers don’t know who you are. They can’t meet you in person or even make any face-to-face contact with you. They must rely entirely on the digital experience, which means they observe your checkout page and use their intuition to decide if they can trust you. But what if there was a way to make the intangible aspects of building trust, feel more tangible? If you could measure a user’s level of trust with your brand more efficiently, wouldn’t you like to?
Of course you would!
According to Harvard Business Review, customers tend to rely more on intuition than deliberation when making a buying decision online. I guess we do lead with our heart rather than our head when it comes to shopping? Users judge everything about your brand’s internet presence – from the quality of your brand’s product images to your checkout page, the aesthetics at each stage of the buying journey, the voice and copy used, the professionalism on display or lack thereof and many, many more other implicit clues. All of these areas of your internet presence are opportunities along the way to build trust with your audience(s).
When designing your checkout page, as well as the entire checkout flow, you should be mindful of all the trust signals your brand is displaying or take stock of how many instances your brand may be missing out on. A full stack trust strategy is an ever evolving strategy but many brands are falling short at simple, yet critical stages along a shopper’s buying journey which is leaving revenue on the table. As a quick takeaway that your business can implement or test out today, audit every aspect of your checkout page to make sure it proudly displays your own logo that is consistent with your other website pages, the font is clear and consistent as well as the color scheme. You’d be surprised how many companies build their checkout pages slightly differently to the rest of their site because of the form building software they’ve integrated or the funnel building software doesn’t integrate the way it needs to with your email marketing software. It is common but it is also so avoidable and fixable. Such small changes can bring a sense of safety for shoppers, strengthen customer loyalty, and reduce cart abandonment—skyrocketing your conversions.
Simplify the checkout process
The simpler your checkout process, the less opportunities exist in the checkout flow for any friction to encourage a shopper to jump ship, which in turn will lower the cart abandonment rate and result in a better conversion rate. See, it’s all connected! Sounds simple but if it was that easy, you wouldn’t really need to be reading this 😜. To execute on all that the way you want to, your business needs to eliminate unnecessary elements and ask for less information. Try to make your checkout as easy, simple, intuitive and fast as possible with less clicks.
Put yourself in a shopper’s position and ask yourself, “Do shoppers need to go through four or five pages/steps to complete their purchase? Do they really need to divulge their physical address or birthday? In some instances, obviously depending on the niche or industry your business is in, this information is amazing to have. But if the answers to those questions are loud NOs, you should remove these fields from the checkout. And your customers will thank you for it. Your conversion rates will reflect the changes and your revenue will increase. Sometimes less is more.
A good rule of thumb regarding the complexity or simplicity of your forms is to make filling out the form super easy and intuitive for users through good design. A couple examples of this include:
- Using asterisks for mandatory fields
- Using radio buttons where there are only a few options
- Using dropdowns where there are lists of options, say, a country list
Consumers Digest is dedicated to helping your business eliminate unnecessary blockers your shoppers may feel along the way during different stages of the buying journey. From initial lead magnets and paid ads at the top of the funnel to lead nurturing email campaigns through the entire checkout flow, Consumers Digest encourages your brand to take advantage of the transferable trust our badge exudes. After 6 decades elevating the consumer’s buying experience to make sure they save time, money and feel empowered to shop with confidence, we understand that every business can benefit from amplifying more trust signals at every stage of the buying cycle. Below we’ve added a picture of what our trust badge looks like displayed on high quality product images as well as below the checkout button. Adding a trust mark like this at these critical points during the customer journey does have a significant impact on conversion rates and overall revenue. It certainly doesn’t hurt to take away some of your buyer’s fears as they are just a click away from purchase.
Display social proof
Social proof as a strategy to increase conversion rates has always worked to some extent, no matter the technology implementing it. Ads on the radio endorsed by people you feel you know and trust convinced shoppers of the era to make purchases. Television enhanced a brand’s ability to target segmented audiences. The internet era spanning the last 20+ years has produced companies like Google, Apple and Facebook, empowering the advertising industry with technology to target desired audiences with unimaginable precision. But the way social media, as a cultural force, has disrupted traditional product/service reviews derived from expert opinions/research/recommendations in favor of UGC reviews (user generated content) has been nothing short of astounding.
According to Nielsen, 92% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they know. It isn’t completely clear in isolation what causes the distrust of a brand from a consumer’s perspective – whether it’s their website, their policies, their culture or something else, but the data has been showing us for a while now that we’d rather trust our peers.
There’s a reason word of mouth withstands the test of time as many consider it the most trusted source of advertising. It makes the buying process human. Reviews and ratings come in just after word of mouth in terms of the hierarchy of consumer trust. Products that have a lot of strong reviews and ratings with 4 to 5 stars do convince other shoppers to convert and make a purchase. Just think, your current and past customers can’t wait to tell other users about how great they think your brand and its products/services are. These testimonials are still helping you convert future shoppers into customers long after the initial sale. From a cost perspective, that’s a huge CAC reducer you can tap if you cultivate a brand many feel inclined to leave reviews and give good ratings to. And when customers perform these desired actions, you need to feature them in strategic areas like near your product images/descriptions and add to cart/checkout buttons. Display social proof in close proximity to your trust badge(s) so that the two may become more powerful working together than either one on their own.
Lume Cube made the choice to display some of their testimonials in a continuous carousel format towards the bottom of their home page. They’ve made a great use of the space on their website drawing shoppers into the great things their current customers are saying about their brand. We have seen many brands feature ratings, reviews, and images of the product customers bought on product pages as well as checkout pages. Alternatively, we have also seen merchants have success with social share counts, live sales notifications and other forms of video testimonials. If that weren’t enough social proof strategies for your business to try, you can further motivate shoppers to buy by displaying the number of visitors who are actively viewing the item creating a sense of urgency, how many items were sold in your store so shoppers get a sense of popularity and reassurance from the collective, and how many people have already made a purchase.
All these strategies have their place in the eCommerce universe but it really all comes down to what your business is trying to optimize for, what your product is, what your brand stands for and what your customers’ preferences are like.
Offer instant customer service
The likelihood that your potential customers will have questions during the checkout process is high. It is so common with 3rd party merchants that we have seen the rise of entire customer support industries over the last 20 years with companies like G2 Crowd and Capterra leading the way. To provide your shoppers with instant support without forcing them to leave the checkout page, you can use a number of different tools ranging from live chat systems to customized ticket taking software and everything in between. Customer support tools are designed to help businesses in the management, organization and tracking of customer queries and concerns. They should also store all information relevant to customer service, which can be used to come up with valuable business insights. We encourage all businesses to eventually develop some sort of strategy to support customers at the right times during their buying journey and make them feel secure to complete the purchase.
Using email to answer or address customer issues and tracking them on spreadsheets may be a cheap option at first, but you are risking losing customers if they get angry because you missed their email. And you can avoid this so you probably should. You want to enable your business to manage, organize and track customer requests using a single platform where it is all visible in one source of truth. Likewise, your customer support function consolidates issues and conversations automatically. It then associates specific issues with customer records, providing your CRM and sales/marketing/product/engineering teams with more insights to personalize their efforts going forward.
We have seen many brands win in the customer support category because they double down so strategically on how they utilize their ticketing systems. These businesses optimize the customer experience by collecting and transforming customer emails, calls, social posts, chat messages, comments and other brand interactions (really any channel a customer can interact with your brand on – hey Gorgias) into tickets which then get routed to support agents for immediate resolution. Sometimes the biggest conversion boosts we’ve seen are so simple yet so effective. By offering a little messenger or live chat button on every page of your website, you are letting the shopper know they can contact someone at any time. Shoppers can click it to to start chatting with a customer service agent immediately and that derisks a crucial stage in the buying process.
We recommend testing out different tools and strategies as you build your business but your customers should always feel like they can ask you important questions and that they will be replied to.
Be clear about everything
Don’t make shoppers shocked at the checkout. They may love surprising coupons or discounts, but they hate surprises at checkout, especially increased prices due to fees.
To avoid that, you should make sure everything is clear and transparent from the jump. This information needs to be stated clearly on the add to cart and checkout pages and should include information about price, accurate product specs and descriptions, shipping methods, refund policies, customer service policies, any warranties and return policies. Another phenomenal place to present this information in a very clear way is the transaction email you send that customer automatically once the purchase is made. Klarna does a good job of this by sending you the financial details (with the image below detailing the item you bought, it’s just not pictured) so you understand exactly where every dollar of your purchase is going.
We also recommend your business create separate pages for shipping, refund, and return policies. They can all be in the same page but for simple design purposes, we recommend taking the time to just create new pages and inserting them in the footer of your website or something easy. Make sure they can be clicked on at any time throughout the buying journey. For example, Fashion Nova did an excellent job of creating dedicated pages for their shipping info, returns, help center and quite a few others as you can see. They also created size guides for more in-depth advice and information.
Being strong at customer service is the backbone of your business. It’s where your brand can really create separation in a crowded landscape of retailers and your values as a company can build trust/goodwill with users over time. Help your customers buy from you. Make their experience easy and delightful. It is always a winning formula.
Show the right trust badges
We have already touched upon trust badges and their value above but while we think our seal is just fabulous, we would be remiss if we didn’t take the time to chat with you a little about the many kinds of trust badges out there, signaling all kinds of things to potential shoppers. Trust badges, sometimes referred to as security badges, trust symbols, trust seals and trust marks, are meant to act as guarantees to convey your store’s trustworthiness. Sometimes businesses prefer to showcase payment badges. Other times maybe you’ll see SSL badges (Secure Socket Layer) to show users that their business protects the internet connection and the information that is shared across that connection. Maybe you’ll see a “free shipping” or “free returns” badge which are pretty self explanatory but do move the needle when it comes to conversions. No matter which badges are being used, you’ll see lots of companies place different types of badges on their product images and checkout page as well as in their headers/footers all in an effort to convince you that their store is legitimate, their payment methods are safe and all the data being collected is secure.
Like we’ve already covered in sections above, we thought it was worth reminding you of the importance payment badges play in the purchasing process. In fact, payment badges are often the most used type of trust mark and seem to provide the highest level of impact towards building trust with an online shopper:
The higher the prices of your products are, or the less known your store is, the more critical it is to show trust badges on your store. Shoppers need to be sure you’re real before they add an item to their cart.
Another great use case for trust badges comes from a brilliant company called Tray.io. This company is an industry leader helping other businesses build their dream automations and integrations. The image below is an example of how they are showcasing awards won from G2 Crowd, a massive peer-to-peer software review marketplace, to display their credibility as a category winner towards the bottom of their email campaigns. It is a phenomenal use case where strategically placed trust badges do decrease the likelihood of the email recipient abandoning the sales funnel while the data shows, the credibility the badge generates actually increases conversions when delivered via this marketing channel, driving sales.
Something that isn’t discussed enough in our opinion is how your business can decide which types of badges to use because not all trust badges are created equal. You should go with recognized third parties. Always split test if you aren’t sure which badge brings the most effective results. We’d also like to remind you that our trust badge was designed with the different aspects of the different categories of trust badges in mind so that you know one badge is telling your brand’s trust story without all the clutter of a lot of different badges telling your shoppers different stories. See how that can be confusing?
Think of the Consumers Digest trust badge as sort of a catch-all of trust badges. We recognize that customers need to feel safe and secure when they pay. We know they feel more at ease when there are warranties, shipping and privacy policies baked into your brand’s buying process. Let Consumers Digest showcase your brand’s trustworthiness to your customers all in one place. We got you.
Use express checkout:
After you’ve gone through the effort of browsing the internet, doing your research, possibly eliminating some of your choices, going forward with your winners and then actually adding products to your cart, do you really feel like making an account at the very end of all this in order to complete your purchase? Yes…said no one ever.
In fact, research suggests that online shoppers are so disenchanted with having to make an account that 23% of your potential customers will leave your store without completing their order if you require them to create an account before they complete the checkout stage. People in today’s world want to do things quickly and have instant results. Your business has to adapt to that type of buying behavior.
Don’t force your shoppers, especially first-time buyers, to create an account before they can complete their order. Unfortunately, it has a high probability of turning them off.
Instead, add the guest checkout button or use express checkout methods, even one click checkout software if you want to give shoppers a delightful user experience through the checkout process. Just some food for thought here – websites that use PayPal at checkout have a 47% higher conversion rate than those that don’t. This has been proven over the last decade of observable eCommerce purchase behavior. And we’re entering an era where companies like Stripe, Venmo, Square, BNPLs (Buy now, Pay Later businesses like Affirm and Klarna) and a whole host of other payment options are providing flexibility in the eCommerce industry at the checkout stage. These payment options have a chance to change the game from a conversion standpoint and we hope they continue to blaze a trail!
The big takeaway: You can always follow-up with more information after the sale is completed. It’s quite easy to entice people to register for different things with your brand if you can offer them extra value (such as special discounts, promos or other loyalty incentives). All in all, if your checkout flow is transparent with shoppers about what to expect at each step, you’re directly signifying that you won’t be stealing your customers’ time while you help provide them with solutions to their problems.
Concluding advice for merchants
Now it’s your turn.
Learning about useful techniques to build trust with shoppers and reduce cart abandonment at different stages along the customer journey is only part of the battle. You need to hold yourself and your team(s) accountable by implementing some of these tactics and testing over time. The best learning happens when you put theory into action and test your hypothesis. These tactics are by no means fancy or novel ideas. They’re simple but can make the biggest difference in your sales.
Just think, every day, you could be losing up to a staggering 70% of your profits. That sentence hurt just to type out. What if you could capture even a couple percentage points of profits back? What would that mean to your business and your support system?? Trust badges exist to significantly decrease this number by clearly and briefly displaying some of your most valuable information at the most critical touchpoints along the customer journey. Not only is it arguably one of the most cost effective strategies to hedge against customers leaving your sales funnel but if displaying a trust badge can help you claw back even a small percent of profits over time, let alone possibly a sizable or even large percent of profits, isn’t it worth doing? Ask yourself if your brand can really afford to keep leaving all that revenue on the table by not having one.
To build a real connection with your customers, you have to present them something authentically yours and the offer needs to provide value. With so many strategies to reduce cart abandonment at your fingertips, the trickier parts will be how your team chooses to integrate some or many of them into your business. We apologize for sounding like a broken record but testing is the best way to figure out what resonates best with your target audience(s). Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. Adjust your efforts intelligently over time as trends change and behavior shifts. As your revenue capture machine becomes more efficient, you will see less users bounce from your funnel before completing a purchase and we like this for you. We really do 🤙.
