Prevent shopping cart abandonment
Posted 6 February 2007 at 10:22AM by Alexa Williamson in Ecommerce and online payments
As a follow-up to yesterday's post on setting up online payments on your website, it's worth talking about how to avoid shopping cart abandonment. Ie - customers have selected what they want to buy from you (added a product to their shopping cart), but then fail to proceed to the checkout and pay.
Marketing website Taming the Beast claims a few reasons why this happens are because customers are:
- comparison shopping - choosing a few items, thinking about buying them, then waiting till later
- confused about how to complete the purchase
- impatient because it takes too long to complete the purchase
- afraid of entering their personal/credit card details into your payment gateway because it doesn't seem secure enough
Fortunately, there are a few remedies for these problems:
- Show stock availability as soon as possible. It's annoying to put something in your cart and have it show up as 'none available' after you've added it
- Display any shipping or other charges for the purchase early on in the shopping process
- Make it as easy and as quick as possible to load a shopping cart and go through the payment gateway
- Show prices in different currencies or have a currency converter on site, when appropriate
- Display 'buying', 'shipping' and 'return policy' FAQs as they will answer any questions customers have while checking out
- Use a payment gateway that is well-known and trusted by your customers
Tags: ecommerce transactions, online shopping cart, using a payment gateway
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