UX Design Tips To Combat Your Cart Abandonment Rates
Every eCommerce product manager would agree: Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest obstacles keeping you from your sales targets. On average 70% of online shoppers leave their carts before making the purchase which damages conversion rates and increases customer acquisition costs. But here’s the good news — there are plenty of smart UX design strategies for your online store that can help you lower the number of abandoned shopping carts as well as noticeably improve customer experience on your site.
This article will help you understand the reasons that cause shoppers to leave your website before completing the purchase as well as find simple solutions to fix these issues and make your eCommerce business thrive.
Why Does UX Design Matter For Your Online Store?
User experience (UX) refers to any interaction a user has with a product or service. Meanwhile, the goal of UX design is to create easy, efficient, and pleasant experiences for the user.
When it comes to selling your products online, you can’t just rely on them selling themselves.
Providing a great user experience can make a big difference — from making it easier for people to buy to encouraging them to buy more often.
The effectiveness of your eCommerce website can be determined by the user experience it offers. The simpler it is for your visitors to use, the more likely they are to visit again. This is why you have to implement UX design techniques that ensure that your customers can easily navigate your site, find what they’re looking for, and ultimately — buy it.
What Is Cart Abandonment and What Causes It?
Shopping cart abandonment happens when customers leave the eCommerce website before completing the purchase. The cart abandonment rate defines the ratio between visitors who complete the purchase and those who fail to complete the check-out process.
The average conversion rate is only 3%, meaning that 97% of visitors globally don’t finish their purchases. By tracking your cart abandonment rates regularly, you can ensure that you find and eliminate issues that keep your users from completing their orders.
Some of the most common causes of shopping cart abandonment are:
1. Extra Costs
Nothing can upset an online shopper more than unexpected costs that only appear at the checkout. Hidden extra charges can make people feel disappointed and fooled which, in turn, will make them leave your site without finishing their purchase.
2. Unclear Checkout Process
Nowadays, people expect their online shopping experiences to be as smooth and convenient as possible. If the checkout process is complicated, requires filling in multiple fields, and requests lots of extra information, it can become a serious cause of unfinished purchases.
3. Asking to Create an Account
If you’re asking your visitor to make an account to complete the shopping process, you are adding an extra obstacle between them and a finished purchase. This can slow down the checkout flow and make people abandon their carts as not everyone is ready for that level of commitment. Remember, often people are just looking for a one-time purchase and mandatory registration will be a deal-breaker for them.
4. Insufficient Payment Methods
Having one or two payment options on your eCommerce site is no longer enough. Nowadays, customers expect to see various payment options and you can easily lose a customer if you don’t provide them.
5. Slow Shipping
When it comes to your shipping policy it’s not only about the price. There are many shoppers for whom the delivery time is an even more important factor. If your site is not offering express or same-day deliveries, you might fall behind your competitors.
6. Page Loading Times
There’s no easier way to ruin your customer’s experience than by having a page that takes ages to load. Site errors make people feel insecure so if your website is slow and crashes often, it will directly influence the visitor’s willingness to make a purchase.
7. The Site Doesn’t Look Trustworthy
It’s crucial that your eCommerce site looks trustworthy and secure for first-time visitors. Shoppers will be hesitant to fill out their credit card details and personal information on a site that they don’t trust. If you fail to convince your customers that you will protect their data and identity, they will most likely abandon your eCommerce site without making the purchase.
10 UX Design Tips to Combat Cart Abandonment
Do you want to improve the revenue and profit of your online store? Then reducing shopping cart abandonment rates is a must. These easy UX design strategies will help you ensure a better shopping experience for your customers which, in turn, will generate more sales.
1. Flexible Payment Options
If users can’t pay you, they can’t buy anything from your site. It means that accepting different payment methods is a must to ensure that every shopper can send money your way and finalize their purchase.
When it comes to payments, the process has to be fast, functional, and simple. Reduce the number of fields the customer has to fill in to complete the payment, include auto-completes, and store data for returning customers. When customer finds their desired payment method on your site and the process is easy and hustle-free, they are less likely to leave your online store empty-handed.
2. Improve Your Site Speed
Over half of digital shoppers bounce from a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Nowadays, the eCommerce industry is becoming more and more competitive and consumers are becoming more impatient. You have to provide a quick and easy shopping experience to keep shoppers on your site. Constantly checking your page load times and ensuring that every page loads fast will help you reduce bounce rates and provide a better experience for your visitors.
3. Make It Straight Forward
Your customer’s path to purchase should be easy to navigate and designed in a way that the shopper’s attention is directed towards completing the payment. A well-placed CTA button can help customers along the way. For example, by providing a “Checkout” button on every page, you can speed up their shopping process and increase conversions. Use contrasting colors to make your buttons stand out, and clear verbs to indicate what action the user has to complete next.
4. Use Exit-Intent Popups
Exit-intent popups are used to retain website visitors when they are about to leave your site.
When the user’s cursor moves outside the upper page boundary, the popup is triggered. You can use this popup to offer special perks, discounts, or offers that will convince the shopper to stay on your site and complete their purchase.
When it comes to adding exit-intent popups on your website, remember they have to be relevant and the call-to-actions have to be clear and motivate users to take action.
5. Be Mobile-Friendly
Most of the eCommerce transactions are now done on mobile devices and if shoppers have a negative experience on your mobile site, they’re 62% less likely to purchase from you again. This means that not only your checkout should be optimized for smartphones, but the entire website should work perfectly on mobile devices. Avoiding many form fields, small buttons and fonts, and slow page loading times will help you keep visitors on your site and improve conversions.
6. Abandoned Cart Emails
If a customer enters their email address before leaving your site, you can use it to send them a follow-up email that reminds them to complete the checkout process. In fact, abandoned cart emails can produce an average conversion rate of 18.64%.
The copy of this email should include a link to the initiated cart, so it’s as easy as possible for the customer to pick up right where they left off. You can also include a small discount to give them even more reasons to revisit their purchase.
7. Leverage Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon whereby people refer to the behavior of others to guide the way they act. In the context of online shopping, it means that buyers look at the customer reviews and trust them when making their own buying decisions. You can leverage this psychological phenomenon by adding ratings, testimonials, and third-party reviews to your website.
Using social proof in your UX design will also help you improve the credibility of your site. If people see others reacting positively to your products or services, they are more likely to think that way themselves. Moreover, social proof encourages people to take action — seeing many shoppers buying certain products can serve as a psychological indicator to people that they should do the same thing.
8. Implement a Live Chat
Using a live chat on your eCommerce site is a great way to ensure that the questions of your visitors are answered immediately and without them leaving your site. If the customers can solve their issues in real-time, they are more likely to proceed with their purchases, whereas if they are required to leave your site or email customer service they might never return to finish their purchase. Providing real-time sales assistance will not only noticeably improve your conversion rates but will also provide you with useful insights into your customer experience and help you find ways to improve it.
9. Increase the Trustworthiness Of Your Site
Almost 20% of shoppers abandon their carts if they don’t trust the eCommerce site with their credit card information. Earning customer trust can help you ensure that shoppers complete their purchases. One way to do it is by displaying visual icons that symbolize security like the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) seal from Norton, Google’s Trusted Store badge or the PayPal Verified one.
10. Trigger Scarcity
The principle of scarcity means that people tend to want what they can’t have. Customers place a higher value on things that might soon be unavailable to them and are more likely to complete the purchase if they think they might miss out on a certain product. You can use this strategy by making things available for a limited time only, for example by indicating sales deadlines, limited discounts, and time-bound purchases, or by displaying a notification when the product is almost out of stock. The fear of missing out will urge your shoppers to make the purchase and thus reduce your cart abandonment rates.
Useful Tools To Help You Increase Conversions
When implementing new UX design strategies on your site it’s all about tracking, analyzing, and testing the performance of different site elements to figure out what brings you the most conversions. There are plenty of tools available that will help you explore your customer needs better and find the best tactics to increase your conversion rates. Here are some of them:
- To understand how people move around your website use heat map tools.
- Measure when visitors drop off your page with funnel tools.
- Track your links and see how your content performs with URL shorteners.
- Get feedback from your visitors with website feedback tools and online feedback forms.
- Use A/B testing tools to compare two different versions of a web page to see which performs best.
Wrap up
Shopping cart abandonment is a common problem faced by eCommerce professionals worldwide. If left unsolved, it can negatively impact your conversion rates and reduce sales. The good news is that some simple UX design techniques can help you recapture abandoned carts and regain control over your conversions. It’s all about optimizing customers’ paths to purchase, designing a checkout process that sparks trust, and ensuring a shopping experience that is convenient for your buyers.
