Day 20: Shopping Cart Abandonment: What are some common ways of handling this issue?
As with all of these topics, there were many articles, but the opening paragraph to this one made me laugh:
Imagine if shopping in the real world were the same as shopping online. You walk into a supermarket or a department store, start filling up your shopping cart, only to be suddenly distracted by a kitten playing with a nerf gun in Aisle 3. You promptly forget about whatever it is you were thinking of buying, watch the kitten for a while, then walk out of the store.
Interesting fact: The average rate of shopping cart abandonment based on a study from Listrak is 73%.
This article of 13 tips is pretty detailed. As with other challenges, a lot of these tips are for the web site creators and designers. But since your emphasis is testing, here are those I find “most testable.”
Sending an automatic e-mail for the user
Non invasive pop-up or a toastr (or something else) before the user leaves
Making sure that the prices on the cart do not increases suddenly
Making sure that the user have a nice experience through the payment process
This is one of the most challenging thing for an e-commerce.
So for this many things come up to my mind:
Improve the UX team: Many issues comes from the UX because they should improve constantly the User Interface to let the user have a good experience while he is navigating through the website. An important improvement could be the load time between pages, usability and accessibility and other elements that could be critical.
Put some advertisements: Whenever a user tries to leave the page, it would be a good idea (depending on the cases of course) to trigger a pop up to try to let the user stay in the website. Maybe this popup could contain a special offer or whatever.
If you can, use well-known payment platform (e.g. abandoned Shopify checkouts because of the logo NOT being there/trustworthy: https://bit.ly/1MJmRZR)
make sure that you’re taking the absolute miminum personal data input from the user - and communicate that you’re doing so.
make checkout short/concise - if it cannot be a one-pager, give the user a nice progress indicator & a reminder o what they’re buying (thumbnails, list, option to return to cart without losing state)
costs (shipping!) always up-front - a surprise price bump-up at the checkout is bad UX, up to suggesting you’re deliberately dishonest.
Conversely, if you can guarantee cheap/free shipping, make note of the fact, in some cases right next to the product price
*Users should be able to save carts for future consideration (and buying the same wares/service again, e.g. done via order history)
Return policy - even if it’s law-regulated (as it is in EU - free return for 14 days after online purchase) - is worth reminding