Infographic: Tips to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment

When you consider that about 75% of online shopping cart purchases are abandoned, you know there is tremendous upside opportunity for those that get their checkout right. The secrets to success haven’t changed much, but the ease of implementing them is improving. It’s not too late to get some of these improvements in before the Holiday shopping season is over!

Because there are not many retailers out there that can overhaul their checkout in one go, here are my top 5 priorities taken from the suggestions in the excellent Monetate infographic below.

1. Customer Ratings & Reviews

Providing trustable customer reviews increases sales (in this example, by 58%). While you can build this too, companies like PowerReviews offer extensive services that may be worth the expense.

2. Suggestive Selling

In my view, Suggestive Selling goes beyond cross-selling into suggesting complementary items (batteries for a toy, shapewear for a dress, etc.) You can build a recommendation engine yourself, use an open source framework such as PredictionIO, or use any of a number of services like 4-Tell. But nothing is worse than a stupid engine. Monitor your site to make sure you are suggesting the right things to optimize sales and communicate to your customer that you understand their needs.

3. Abandoned Cart Emails

Most marketing automation services can do this. Take the time to set it up. Retailers reported this strategy had the highest success rate of all personalization tactics.

4. Alternative Payment Options

Security and convenience are the top two reasons customers appreciate alternative payment options. Here are some compelling statistics from Magento on the benefits of adding PayPal.

5. Visible Shipping Costs

This study found that surprise shipping costs were the number one reason for cart abandonment. Don’t try to hide this info. Make your pricing as reasonable as you possibly can (Bright Idea: do A/B testing to measure ROI for different rates).