How To Increase Your Shopping Cart Conversion Rates
By Jane Dawson
One of the most frustrating areas of retail sales is the dismal level of shopping cart abandonment. Researchers report that over 60 percent of shopping carts are abandoned. It is disheartening to have succeeded in attracting a potential buyer and coaxing that buyer all the way to a loaded shopping cart only to have the potential buyer dissolve away without purchasing.
We know that some of the reasons that people abandon their cart have to do with shipping charges that come as a surprise, items being out of stock or becoming confused and unable to work the system. We also know that some people are simply comparison shopping and never really intended to purchase in the first place.
Clearly, online retailers need to work at softening the blow of shipping charges by helping their customer find the best shipping deal, make their checkout process fool proof so that it is always possible for even the newest Internet user to purchase and keep items in stock as much as possible.
Now, however, there is another reason why shopping carts are abandoned. Research is showing that more shoppers are doing their shopping while at work and may have to abandon their carts simply because they are suddenly interrupted and must return to work without completing their purchasing
That is very good news because those customers do want to buy from you they just did not have the chance to finish. One of the easiest ways to at least try to bring that customer (and those who have abandoned for other reasons) back to your site is to save the shopping contents and send a note to the customer, reminding them that they have items in their cart.
Yet barely 10 percent of the Internet Retailer Top 500 online retailers give shoppers the chance to retrieve an abandoned shopping cart, according to a test by email marketing company Listrak.
Listrak researchers registered with email addresses at 398 of the Top 500 retailers, put an item in the cart and then left the site. Only forty two sites sent a reminder and of the forty two, only eleven sent the reminder within twenty four hours.
Of the other 102 sites, some did not require an email address before shopping or, they required a credit card number before the researcher could even start shopping, a generally negative practice. While shoppers are not happy with going through a long registration process, just to start shopping, most will not object to an email address. Without that address, retailers have no way of contacting them in follow up.
Listrak also discovered:
- Only 36% of e-retailers sent personalized messages using the shopper’’s first and last name despite all of them having collected this data.
- 60 percent of retailers that offered an incentive in their abandonment email personalized the message.
- 23.8 percent of emails linked directly to the shopping cart (23.81 percent).
- 45.2 percent of emails offered an incentive (45.23 percent).
- Average time to send reminder was 75.1 hours.
Email management programs are available that will automatically send out a reminder about a shopping cart. The reminder can be personalized with names, offers and incentives. If you are not doing this, you are missing a big opportunity.
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