Advice on How to Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment
Pamela Picard
Principal, Scarletts Closet Sample Sale
Scarlett's Closet Sample Sale tracks incomplete transactions. We contact the buyer to determine if they simply changed their minds or had a problem we can assist to solve. It doesn't stop abandonment, but it occasionally rescues a sale.
Director, Media Technology at Fuor Digital
Great topic!
I've done this many times so here's the basic framework:
1) Tag all pages/steps through the process so you can track visitor behavior.
2) Find any high drop points from step to step. Basically any click rate from step to step that is below 100% is an opportunity. Of course, 100% is an ideal and unreachable, but that's the goal.
3) Optimize those pages (see below for suggestions)
Three Analytics Suggestions
- look at the referrers of the traffic going to your shopping cart. Is one of your advertising channels sending you traffic but have high abandonment rates? If so, maybe you should put your ad dollars somewhere else.
- look at the types of products and sections on the website that users who reach your shopping cart visit. Are certain pages/products attributing to less or more abandonment. Maybe you need more videos of your products/services as users from those pages are not abandoning so high?
- Are users who abandon their carts coming back later and buying? Or buying offline? Or calling your 800 number for info? Maybe initial abandonment rates don't matter. Using Web Analytics you can track those returning visitors and find your average sales lag cycle.
There are many reasons why people may abandon their cart. The main one is that they are browsing so they want to see how much the product is in the cart including tax, shipping, extra fees, etc so they can truly compare pricing.
However, there are generally some basic usability steps you can take to decrease user abandonment such as:
- decreasing the number of steps needed to check out
- accepting a variety of payment options
- don't ask for anything you don't need (such as if they want to subscribe to your newsletter)
- don't ask for info you don't need (i.e. social security number, job title, etc)
The most important one is: MAKE IT EASY. Make it easy to add/remove, see shipping costs, ask questions, find phone numbers, etc. DON'T MAKE ME THINK by Steve Krug is a great usability book. My bible actually.
Last, a quote:
"A September 2006 MarketingSherpa.com article presented the results of a shopping cart abandonment survey study of 1,100 e-commerce marketers. The average reported cart abandonment rate was 59.8%. Roughly one out of every two visitors who adds an item to their shopping cart ultimately abandons it instead of completing their purchase."
from http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/articles/2007/05/tackling-the-shopping-cart-abandonment-rate.html
Links:
Marketing Consultant at Dell
E, I dont think that a lot of online companies do a good job defining abandonment in the first place. If companies know what constitutes an abandonment, they will be able to formulate strategies and metrics to counter it. I think of abandonment as an act during which a shopper may do two things: 1) Put something in the cart and not complete the sale before leaving the site 2) Put something in the cart and then throw it out
The first involves tracking a cart and follow up activities after the customer has left and the second involves tracking a cart and real time actions while the customer is shopping.
Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Zimplizity Solutions
Hello E.
After defining your abandonment. Get a good analytic tracking tool. There are several free web analytic tool like Google Analytics. This tool will help you identify where your shoppers are having a hard time or where are they abandoning your site. With this you will be able to find out what are the frictions on the certain page. Maybe its just a simple button or placement of call to action and several other details.
Why would you write something about a topic that you are not a 100% sure. I think the people who should write about this are the ones who had the first hand experience doing it. or you can get them to send some case studies for you which I what you are doing right now.
Reducing abandonment rate is more on the persuasion and usability of the cart. There are lots of book and articles about this on the web all you have to do is enhance it or study them carefully so you can use them as baseline for your ebook.
Im including some of the sites I found. Grok is from Futurenow Inc. they are really good persuasion engineers.
I hope I've been helpful. Send me a line if you need anything else.
Links:
- http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/articles/2007/05/tackling-the-shoppi...
- http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/24/shopping-cart-abandonment/
Owner, Sterling Advertising Company
Hello E
This is such a good subject - I am also interested in what has prompted you to write about it, although I believe that you are asking this question to get multiple viewpoints rather than because you don't know about it.
To use website analytics to understand abandonment of any path, you first need to map that path. What is the optimal path through your pages that a shopper should take? Is it landing page, cart, shipping, payment otpions, checkout? Is it landing page, suggested items, wishlist, cart, suggested items, cart, payment, shipping, checkout? Etc. This is your sales funnel.
Once you have that path you can use analytics to see where people are dropping out of your sales funnel. You can measure exactly how many people went from page 1 to the last page, and you can figure out where they fell out of the process and work on those pages.
For example, your shopping cart might be being abandoned at the shipping page. If so, you can use analytics to understand that this is where one of your issues is, as that's a high exit page. Perhaps your shipping options are not clear, or are too expensive, too restrictive, too many options that require research to understand. Whatever the problem, analytics can only show you where the problem is. So, for our example of the shipping page being a high abandonment area, we now have a baseline to measure improvement against and can begin to work on the problem and track it.
Let's say that we decide that we need to explain why our crystal goblets need special packaging that drives shipping rates up - we write a paragraph of text that really promotes the fact that we care deeply about the consumer and that they get what they expect when it arrives, in good condition. We then add this to a shipping page, with 50% of shoppers getting this version with the shipping description and 50% getting the old version, and then we use website analytics to compare the two.
Did it make a difference? If so, did it solve the problem? If it did, then you're in great shape. If it didn't, go back and try something else. Keep testing and reading your anaytics against your benchmark, and you'll get there eventually.
Hope this helps. Good luck with the book.
Claire
Marketing and Advertising Professional
Hello E,
Here's what I do; I take the visitors that browsed the longest or put an item in the shopping cart and then send them a "Special Offer" email (ie 10% off or Free Shipping). Obviously the offer code is unique on the special offer so I can track results and I have had a 1.05% conversion from the special offer. Not a huge response but sometimes you have to pay big $ to get a 1% return so for free, it's great!
Good luck with your book.
Jim C -
Owner
www.FrameThatMoment.com
Links:
Online Marketing Manager at Ipswitch, Inc.
First and foremost, tag all pages of the shopping flow using an analytics package like Omniture, so you have metrics of how many visitors are hitting your cart. You'll see data on each page of the flow and determine which pages are causing the biggest drop-off. And, determine the overall shopping cart conversion to set a baseline to try and improve. Typically, the page that asks for the most personal information or credit card number will lose the most visitors. Optimize the poor performing pages by running an A/B split test. Example: If initial overall conversion is 30% (70% abandonment), some simple changes through testing and improving page navigation can increase conversion +5% or more. Sometimes it's an ongoing process -- Read data, setup a test, analyze results, repeat.
eCommerce | Digital Marketing | Mobile Professional
Although I would love to see you "...stop shopping cart abandonment", it may be an optimistic goal. There are a number of best practices in terms of persuading your customers to complete the buy online, however assuming all customers intend to buy when they put items in the cart is not a fair assumption. In my opinion, the Web checkout is a complicated emotional experience conjuring up need, desire, anxiety and most importantly happiness. Increasing conversion doesn't start at the shopping cart, it starts at the power page (or entry page) and can be qualified in the context of cross-channel visitor engagement, brand relationship and lead generation.
Clearly, Analytics tools won't give you info on your customers' emotional state, but it's important to pick the right analytics tool that will help you understand the data in context. You'll also need to design your site for analytics for help in understanding visitor volume trends, conversion funnels, clickstreams forward and reverse path analysis, page popularity and so on. Keep in mind that, if you're a cross-channel eCommerce site vs. a pure play, the same shopping cart abandonment data will glean different insights.
The best case study is Amason's one-click-buy and Apple's licensing and adaptation of the same.
Senior Online Marketing/Analytics Consultant;Google Adwords Qualified Professional;Google Analytics Authorized Consulant
Hi E,
There are several analytics books, by established analytics experts that touch on the subject, you might want to check out these books as you write your ebook.
The authors/books that come to mind are:
- Eric Petersons' Web Analytics Demystified
- Avinash's Kaushik's Web Analytics - An Hour a Day
- Brian Clifton's Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics
- The articles and blog posts by the folks at FutureNow
While these books are not specific to shopping cart abandonment, they do have chapters on eCommerce, conversion rates, funnels and metrics to measure abandonment rates and improve conversion rates.
Hope this helps,
Feras
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