• A pricing discrepancy in which the price is higher than expected.
• Something about the checkout procedure is confusing to the customer.
• The checkout process is too slow and annoying.
• The customer has doubts about the security of their payment information.
• The customer realizes they can’t pay with the method they want to use.
• The store requires a login/password and the customer doesn’t want to sign up
• The customer’s coupon code doesn’t work, or another expected discount doesn’t apply.
• The customer decided to wait before purchasing.
• The customer got distracted and forgot to finish checking out.
• The customer just put things in their cart to see what the total price would be.
• The customer found the same item elsewhere at a lower price.

Some of these reasons represent issues that you can address, whether by making changes to your online store or by interacting with the customer. Of course, you can’t fix some of these problems (such as the customer having already made their purchase elsewhere), so you shouldn’t expect to be able to recover 100% of your abandoned carts. However, with properly implemented solutions, you can recover the vast majority of them.

Before you can solve cart abandonment in your online store, you need to thoroughly evaluate which of the listed issues your customers might be encountering, and then address these issues one by one. Each cause for cart abandonment will require its own solution, which we’ll address in the following lessons.

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A customer might fill their cart as a means of remembering what they’re going to order, and then set it aside for a period of time. Maybe they want to ask a family member if it’s the right product, and need to wait for the person to get home. Maybe they make a cart to “save” their order, planning to complete the purchase when they get paid the next day. Sometimes, carts get delayed for a short time, but aren’t abandoned — the customer just wanted to wait a bit.

But sometimes, waiting turns into forgetting, and sometimes a cart was forgotten right away due to a distraction. Maybe the power went out, or the phone rang, or something boiled over on the stove, or the kids woke up. You can’t possibly predict every single reason a customer might forget about their shopping cart, but it happens all the time!

You can recover forgotten shopping carts by communicating with the customer. Sometimes all it takes is a simple reminder, and they’ll return to complete checkout. Many are thankful that you reminded them. Some customers, however, need a little incentive. Maybe they’ve waited a few days and they’re not so sure they want to make the purchase now. You can still get many of them back, too, and in the same way.

Reminders for Momentary Distractions

Sometimes you can quickly recapture a customer’s attention before they click away from your store. One effective way to do this is to implement an unobtrusive box to appear on your site when the customer’s mouse movements suggest they’re about to leave, or if there’s been no activity for a few minutes. The box that appears can display a message that helps convince or remind the customer to complete their order. These boxes are not like pop-up ads — they are modals that appear in the same window as the website and usually resemble a rectangular card.
Not only are modals helpful in keeping a customer’s attention, they can also improve conversions overall by enticing the customer at the right time.

Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

When a cart has been abandoned for a period of time, send your customers an email to remind them to finish their purchase. Sometimes this takes a little incentive, especially if they still don’t return after one email. You can choose to offer a discount code or other bonus to customers who return — getting 10% off might be just enough to bring them back!

The only way to do this effectively is with automation, whether through an email autoresponder campaign or through an app that provides a similar function, like a specialized Abandoned Carts Notification or Abandoned Cart Saver app. Depending on the app or service you use, you can send your customers a single abandoned cart email or a series of them.

Note that from behind your online store’s dashboard, you have no way of knowing why a cart was abandoned. You can’t set up a recovery campaign for people who forgot and a separate campaign for people who weren’t sure about the purchase. You just can’t know which applies to whom, so your abandoned cart recovery emails should be one-size-fits-all.

One idea is to have the first email act as a simple reminder. If the customer completes their purchase, they’ll be automatically taken off the email list, but if their cart remains abandoned, they’ll receive a second email with a discount code. A third email could be sent if one of the products in the customer’s cart was in danger of going out of stock. Others could be set up depending on the nature of your industry.

Since 3dcart comes with its own hosted email accounts, it has built-in email functionality other platforms lack — making it far easier to set up automatic campaigns. Plus, there are a variety of abandoned cart recovery apps available at different price points and levels of complexity. There’s also the excellent 3dboost app for modals, which lets you create fully-customizable boxes as described above.

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Some people will leave an online store if they’re required to create yet another login and password just to check out. Others hate the idea of using their email address to create an account, out of fears that it will be sold to other advertisers, resulting in an influx of spam to their inboxes.

This is a bigger problem with first-time customers who aren’t familiar with your store yet, and some of the measures you might take when increasing your online store’s trustworthiness (Lesson 4) can also help customers feel safe creating a login. However, even if they trust your store, some customers simply won’t want to remember a password and will be reluctant to make an account at all. Whatever their reasons, if your online store requires the customer to create an account, some will be turned off by this and abandon their carts.

Allowing Checkout with No Signup

To solve this problem and serve these customers, implement the ability to check out as a guest.

Of course, in many cases, an email will still be required to complete an order, as you’ll need a way to send the customer their receipt and tracking numbers, but to some customers this doesn’t seem as threatening as “giving you” their email for account creation purposes. It’s just a matter of perception.

There are definite advantages to having customers sign up for accounts, so you can still entice customers to register by offering incentives such as reward points and other loyalty programs. Customers are more likely to make repeat purchases if they’ll accrue rewards, even if they’re already fine with needing to make an account.

3dcart has easy guest checkout implementation, and you can also turn off the email requirement completely. If you allow orders with no email provided, make it clear to your customers that without an email, they have no way of receiving order update notifications! Reward points and loyalty programs are also easy to create.

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The point is, all kinds of things happen that lead to different customers preferring certain payment methods and sometimes only having access to one. If a customer’s preferred payment method isn’t available at checkout, and they don’t have an alternate method that you accept (and that they’re willing to use), they’ll abandon their cart.

You can serve your customers better, and see more carts go through to completion, by adding more payment methods to your online store. However, you shouldn’t just add tons of payment methods in hopes your customers will use them — this clutters your checkout page and hurts performance. Instead, choose payment methods based on demand.

Evaluating Demand for Payment Methods

You can determine demand in a few ways. One consideration is your business’s location and your customers’ locations. Do you need to accept international payments? Is there a popular payment method in a country where you have a lot of customers? Alternately, is there a type of payment that’s most popular for your industry, or for your customer base?

There are some payment methods worth adding to any online store due to their growing worldwide popularity: digital wallets. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and a few others all provide customers with a virtual wallet system in which they can pay at any participating online store with the information they’ve saved into their wallet or into their Google or Amazon account. These types of payment methods help increase conversions in another way as well, by offering the side benefit of a very fast, convenient checkout — especially on mobile.

To get the payment methods you want to offer on your online store, you’ll need to connect them to the software that runs your shopping cart. Fortunately you don’t have to do the technical stuff yourself and it just comes down to selecting them from the methods integrated into your store’s eCommerce software. 3dcart has integrations with over 160 payment processors, giving you far more choices than any other platform.

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To help your customers feel safe shopping with you, you need to follow a dual approach: on one hand, you must implement all the current eCommerce security standards, and on the other hand, you must avoid anything that gives your store the appearance of being anything less than completely legitimate. Not only must you be secure, you must appear secure. If a customer has any doubts, while they might still shop, those doubts will grow as they browse your site and they may get frightened off and abandon their cart.

Protecting Customer Information

First off, in order to accept credit cards online at all, your online store needs to be PCI DSS compliant. PCI compliance is a multifaceted process with the goal of increasing a website’s security in several ways. To become PCI compliant, an online business needs to meet certain requirements such as installing firewalls, running regular malware scans on their website’s server, SSL encryption, and more — which, since this requires the right hardware, software, and personnel with the proper expertise, can be tough for a small business.

Since it’s hard for a small business to meet the rigorous standards for PCI compliance, the better option is to build your online store on an eCommerce platform that has PCI compliance built in. All the scanning, testing, and other work is taken care of by the platform provider itself, so you don’t have to deal with it. 3dcart is one of the few PCI-compliant eCommerce platforms.

You can also implement other security measures that will help convince your customers to go through with their purchase, such as MasterCard SecureCode, Verified by Visa, Trust Guard, and more. A customer who sees these badges on your checkout page is far, far less likely to have second thoughts about their purchase stemming from doubts in your security.

Making Your Store Trustworthy

Your website needs to look reputable, and there are several ways to accomplish this (and a few things to avoid). One of the most important is high-quality content, as that will help your online store look like a real business and not a spam or scam site. Good design is also a necessity, as scammers often throw something together to make a quick buck, as opposed to real businesses that are obviously confident in their brand and have a real interest in sticking around. Clear, correct contact information also improves customer confidence, as people are more likely to shop when they know they can get in touch with a real person if they have a problem.

The appearance of your checkout page also effects customer trust. Everyone has heard of hackers getting into websites and installing malware that lets them steal private data, and the practice of phishing (in which a visitor is sent to an identical copy of a website’s login page that will harvest their login and password for the scammers) is also well-known. So, if your checkout pages look different from the rest of your website, customers may think your site is compromised and leave without checking out.

If the URL (website address) visible in the customer’s web browser’s address bar also changes, this looks even more suspicious. Some eCommerce platforms use a system in which all checkouts are performed on a subdomain rather than the online store itself, and customers are redirected during the checkout process. You don’t need to understand all the technical details — what’s important is to look at it the way the customer sees it: they finish adding items to their cart at yourstore.com, click “Check Out,” and suddenly the web address changes to yourstore.ecommerceplatformstores.com and the page looks totally different.

If the customer doesn’t understand that they’ve simply been redirected for checkout (or even if they do understand, they may not know why), they may think your checkout page is a phishing attack or that your online store has been hacked by a third party that installed their own checkout page. In that case, you can be sure they’ll abandon their cart and probably never return.

On a side note, even if the customer does understand redirects and doesn’t automatically mistrust them, it still looks unprofessional and hurts your brand. A customer might assume you’re not a real business, and just a small-time client of a larger company, which could give them last-minute doubts about the quality of your products. They may decide to leave and buy from a “more established” retailer instead.

Fortunately, most of the tools you’ll need to increase your online store’s security and trustworthiness are easy to get if you have the right eCommerce platform. Choose one that’s PCI compliant and look in its app store for additional security features to add — especially those that add badges certifying your security. To avoid the problems inherent in checkout redirects, only use an eCommerce platform that includes “checkout on own domain.”

The post Increasing Confidence in Your Store’s Security appeared first on Shift4Shop.

Lagging During Checkout

If checkout is extremely slow, you’re likely to lose all but the most dedicated customers. If your checkout loads slowly or lags when the customer clicks, this usually comes down to poor programming or design of your eCommerce website, or poor performance of the server on which your website resides. These problems are much more common on self-hosted eCommerce platforms, in which you’re responsible for hosting and software updates. Other possible causes are large unoptimized graphics, bad programming, or inefficient coding of your shopping cart’s design — like badly-implemented CSS, the code that defines how a website looks.

The best solution for a slow checkout is to use a hosted eCommerce platform with full technical support and reliable, fast server speeds. This takes the job of maintaining the software off your hands and ensures that your online store will be hosted properly. Good programming is also a must, as is efficient theme coding, so your shopping cart won’t be bogged down by errors that make your checkout pages load slowly. 3dcart fits all these criteria and maintains rigorous standards for site speed and efficiency.

Confusing Checkout Procedures

If your checkout pages aren’t laid out properly, you’ll have customers becoming confused as they look to add their shipping and billing information, or even as they look for the final Check Out button. If the customer can’t fill out all the proper fields on their first try, and they end up missing a required piece of information somewhere, they’ll be annoyed when they click “Check Out” only to be told they didn’t fill out all the required information. If the Check Out button itself is in the wrong place, they may not be able to find it before they decide to give up.

Your checkout pages are not the place for creativity. Customers expect everything to be in an obvious location, so keep it straightforward.

User-Unfriendly or Difficult Checkouts

The checkout process should only take a few seconds. Even if your online store works perfectly, you can still have an unfriendly checkout or a checkout that’s difficult to use.

If your checkout requires customers to fill out information on several different pages, they’ll get tired of the process. Likewise, if they have to enter information repeatedly, they may decide it’s not worth the bother. Give your customers the option to use their shipping information as their billing information so they don’t have to enter it twice. Also consider implementing a single-page checkout.

Another checkout usability problem crops up if the customer is trying to shop from a mobile device but your store isn’t designed to be mobile-friendly (aka responsive). It’s hard to navigate a non-responsive website on mobile, and even more difficult to go through a checkout. Today, you simply can’t survive as an eCommerce merchant with a non-responsive website, so only use responsive design. Not only is it far easier for your customers, it also gets you an SEO boost.

3dcart provides the option for a single-page checkout as well as tons of optimized, mobile-ready themes that will give your customers the ideal checkout experience right out of the box.

The post Fixing Slow, Confusing, and Unfriendly Checkouts appeared first on Shift4Shop.

Shipping Charges

Of course customers are aware that they’ll need to have their order shipped to them, but they may not realize the shipping costs have not yet been added to their total. If a customer views their cart and sees a total price listed, they will often expect that to be the total price altogether, and may not notice that shipping has not yet been added — even if you include a note saying shipping will be calculated at checkout.

The solution here is to add dynamically-updated shipping costs to your store’s View Cart page. If your eCommerce software doesn’t include real-time shipping calculations, or doesn’t display them in the View Cart page, you’ll probably have some difficulties adding this feature yourself. Fortunately, real-time shipping visible in View Cart is built in to the 3dcart software, and includes rates for major carriers including USPS, FedEx, and UPS.

Handling Charges

A related price discrepancy occurs if you have an undisclosed handling charge for some of your items. Handling charges come into play when you need to charge the customer for additional time and/or packing materials used when shipping certain products. If you need to add a handling charge, make sure it’s fully visible on the product page and in the customer’s View Cart page.

Tax

Another possible cause for a price discrepancy is when tax is added quite late in the checkout process. Any taxes added to customer orders should also display in View Cart and update dynamically just like shipping charges, especially if some of your products require a high tax rate.

Remember, your goal is to avoid surprising your customer with any additional charges at checkout. If everything that adds to the price is visible early on, customers will be more informed and if they feel the price is getting too high, they may just opt to remove a single item from their cart rather than abandoning their purchase altogether.

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