If you run a website that makes use of an online shopping cart, chances are that you’ve run into this situation a few (or a hundred) times: shoppers visit your store, stay for a few minutes, then leave without taking any action at all. Or worse, they come, fill up their shopping carts, and then leave without converting.
This actually happens more often than you might think; a study by the Baymard Institute concluded that almost 70% of shopping carts end up being abandoned by online shoppers. Initially that number might seem staggering, but when you start to think about the habits of online shoppers, that number starts to make more sense.
We have worked with several clients over the years that their shopping cart system will track who added something to the cart and failed to checkout, and those numbers could be up into the $10,000+ range. It’s crazy! With an abandoned cart, you can now potentially re-claim some of that lost revenue.
Check out our Facebook Live episode chatting about Shopping Carts and what plugin we recommend to help offset things!
Why Shoppers Abandon Their Carts. Can we stop it?
There are a number of reasons for this, and not all of them involve shoppers changing their minds about buying what you’re selling. To know how you can convince shoppers to come back to your site and finish the sales process, though, you have to know the potential reasons they abandoned in the first place.
Was it price? Was it a user interface? Was the shipping price too high? Was the delivery date too long? Did a cat jump on their lap?
People abandon their shopping experience for hundreds of different reasons, many of which you can’t control, but let’s focus on the ones that you can control – The User Experience!
It could be something as simple as a button being white with white text or the button not showing in the correct place, the shipping fees not showing up or the match populating incorrect (example: shipping cost is higher than the pricing of product), or the person wanted to pay with PayPal but you don’t offer that payment solution.
In short, our Omaha SEO experts suggest you don’t assume that someone who has abandoned their cart in your online store is not interested in hearing from you again. With a little bit of strategy and the right tools, you can increase your conversions substantially from these abandoned carts.
A Plugin to Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment?
Are there tools you can use to try and bring shoppers back once they’ve up and gone?
Many shopping cart systems have a variation of a cart abandonment setup so they can track things. While WooCommerce has this also, it does little more than tell you how many people failed to checkout. It doesn’t provide any steps to actually regain contact with those individuals.
That’s where Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce comes in. While they have a pro/paid version of the plugin also, the Lite version does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of tracking. We are big fans of this plugin, and love their professional version.
While you can’t save every sale, there are ways to mitigate the loss.
Today our search engine optimization experts will review and explain what technologies and tools we use in eCommerce websites that we consult on, and what other areas can be enhanced to reduce a loss in a potential sale.
Persistent Cookies Help Customers Complete Orders
Many people use their phones or iPads for shopping, and some complete the checkout on those devices, but there’s a big community of people that don’t complete the checkout when they’re shopping online during that initial search.
Persistent Cookies allows a user to start a shopping experience on one device, like a phone or a computer, and then come back hours, or even days later, to actually complete the checkout.
In this scenario, while your statistics may show that the user abandoned the cart, this is a case of shopping cart abandonment caused not by disinterest but by your customer’s schedule and priorities.
Persistent cookies, transient cookies, and session cookies all fall into this category, and it’s an easy way to let people move between devices without losing their order.
Depending on how you configure the persistent cookie end of things, you could have the cookie on their session for a few hours or even 30 days. It all depends on how you want to interact with the user, and what the next step is in your abandonment routine that you want to take. One potential scenario is that you’re sending a followup email with a coupon. In this case, maybe you want the session to expire so they can now get a discount to complete the order.
Exit-Intent: An Opportunity Before They Leave
You’ve likely been on a website and as you move your mouse out to the Back Button or the Close Button, you get a popup on the screen asking you to sign up for a coupon or for the news letter.
This is an Exit-Intent, and you want to capture them before they walk away.
It’s no different than if you’re about to leave a physical store and a store clerk says “was there anything I could help you find.” The only difference is that they’re saying “if you buy something, I’ll give you 20% off your order right now!
The entire Exit-Intent works by tracking mouse cursor movements of your visitors in real-time, measuring the exact moment a shopper decides to abandon your site. At that moment, the software overlays an additional message from you to try and retain the customer.
It’s sometimes called an “Exit Popup”.
These Exit Popups are not just for discounts either, you can use them to remind the user that they have something in their shopping cart, offer an entry to a contest or the opportunity to download an ebook. This is your opportunity to convert the sale before they potentially leave forever.
Ad Remarketing - Target Previous Visitors
Remarketing campaigns have become very popular over the years, and for good reason. No only are you targeting a previously interested person, but you can usually target them for a fraction of the original aquisition cost.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads allow you a second chance to convince the user to come back to your site. Depending on your marketing campaign approach, you could use this for brand awareness, or if you build specific campaigns you can target specific items too.
Simply put, by using ad remarketing you can track visitors that have previously come to your site and present them with personalized ads on other sites that they visit after they leave yours.
As a leading provider of Omaha SEO services, we have investigated hundreds of websites, and many times the failure of conversion with online shoppers comes down to a lack of familiarity with a brand.
Depending on your market, you could retarget ads for $0.50 or even as little as $0.05 per click, and on Facebook Retargeting, you can even get it lower than that!
What Strategy Will You Implement in an Online Store?
Online shopping carts and ecommerce sites are great ways to make money through your site, but only if you implement it correctly. You must have the correct user interface, and the flow of your site must make sense to your users.
Add in an abandoned cart plugin, a wishlist system, cookies that allow people to use multiple devices for the sale, a popup before they leave the site, and then a retargeting campaign through Google Ads or Facebook, and you have pretty much covered all the bases to recapture a potentially lost sale.
Of course, now that you have them back to your site again, it’s time to learn how to close the sale using Cialdini’s 6 Persuasion Principles.
If you have any questions regarding shopping carts and converting more sales in your online store, just call Kim and Conor at (402) 522-6468.