For an e-commerce site owner, few things are as frustrating as seeing customers fill shopping carts with their products , only to abandon them later for one reason or another. It’s normal if this happens to you a few times, but if this happens to you all the time, perhaps there is something wrong with your site. Here are some of the possible reasons why your visitors abandon their shopping carts.
Your site loads slowly
Internet users today are an impatient bunch. If they have to wait more than three seconds for your site to load, more than half of online consumers, 57 per cent to be exact, will abandon not just your shopping cart, but your site as well. Worse, 80 per cent of online consumers who abandon your site because of slow speeds are also likely never to return.
They don’t like the way your site looks
Your general design has a lot to do with influencing visitors to purchase whatever it is you’re offering. In fact, more than 92 per cent of people say their purchasing decisions are greatly influenced by the visuals they see on any given site.
Also, you have to be a little more discerning about the images of your product/s that you post. People, after all, take only 90 seconds to assess and decide whether they’re going to make a purchase or not. You must always post accurate product images, or you will have a higher return rate because the product isn’t what it looked like on your site.
Aside from pictures of your product, we also recommend posting videos as well, as one out of two customers have more confidence in a product after watching an online video.
Your site/products have few to no product reviews
People these days put a lot of stock on product reviews. Actually, 85 per cent of consumers read online reviews for local businesses before buying anything. Better yet, 79 per cent of those very same consumers treat the reviews they read like a personnel recommendation. And, they’re not just contented with one or two reviews. About 67 per cent of consumers read six reviews or less before they actually trust a business enough to buy something. That’s why you have to make an effort to generate reviews, like establishing a presence on external review sites such as Yelp!, Google Places and Insider Pages.
Hidden charges upon checkout
No consumer likes being slapped with hidden charges, particularly when they’re revealed only upon checkout. Many e-commerce sites are guilty of that, and you probably are too. So if you intend to show customers that there are unavoidable variable charges such as sales tax and specialised shipping, we suggest that you do it as early in the process as possible. That way, customers won’t feel like they’ve been had, and continue patronising your e-commerce site and your products.
Your checkout process may be too lengthy
As already mentioned, today’s Internet users are an impatient lot. Make them go through a lot of steps in the checkout process, and they’re bound to abandon their carts and move on. Ideally, e-commerce checkouts should take no more than five steps in total. Take it beyond that, and they will certainly abandon their shopping carts.
These are just some of the possible reasons why your site visitors abandon their shopping carts. We recommend doing something about them in order to lessen such incidences in the future.