How to entice your customers to fill the e-commerce shopping cart?
As an e-commerce expert, your main concern is to entice your customers to finalise their purchase and see fewer abandoned shopping carts.
Attracting more customers is not the only way to increase revenue for your online shop. One of the best ways is to increase the average cart or order value on your e-commerce site.
Appvizer tells you everything in this article! It answers your questions by explaining how you can optimise your e-Commerce shopping cart.
What is the e-Commerce shopping cart?
The e-commerce shopping cart is a virtual space on an e-commerce site. It groups all the products selected by a web user, before completing his purchases. It is a kind of 'virtual shopping cart' in which the Internet user adds all the products that have aroused his or her interest. The Internet user can modify his basket at any time before confirming his choice and proceeding to online payment.
How to optimise the e-commerce shopping cart?
Cart optimisation is the absolute best technique to significantly reduce e-commerce cart abandonment.
Simplify check out
Once the user has finished choosing the products he is interested in and has filled his cart, the steps that follow should be easy, intuitive and quick without complications. Therefore, try to make the steps that follow quick so that the sale is not lost.
Enhance the benefits
In addition to reminding the customer to finalise his purchase, you must also convey to him the benefits of making that purchase. Only by mentioning the benefits, which must be relevant, can you get him to pull out his wallet and prompt him to click and finalise the purchase.
Using reviews strategically
There is nothing more reassuring than reading your customers' reviews but, of course, they do not come alone. First, send them an e-mail in which you politely ask them to leave a review in which they say what they think about the product. Other customers' opinions function as social proof, so use reviews strategically, including product reviews.
Provide guarantees
It is crucial to offer your online customers guarantees, as not having guarantees could be a sticking point for your customers, so don't forget to make these guarantees explicit in the check out ('money back', after-sales service and product certifications).
Set minimum orders for free delivery
To encourage customers to add more products to their cart, you can offer free delivery if their order exceeds a certain amount. For example, you can offer free delivery for orders over EUR 50. This is a very useful strategy to increase the average value of orders.
If you decide to offer free delivery with a minimum purchase amount, make this information clearly visible on the website of your online store: on the homepage, on product pages and at the checkout.
Offer different payment solutions
Think about offering the possibility of making the purchase using different payment methods, also offer digital payment systems, the use of which is growing rapidly, as customers often believe them to be secure solutions; this way the user can find what he or she wants and complete the purchase smoothly.
Enter payment in instalments
If the amount in the customer's shopping cart exceeds 100 euros, we recommend that you include payment in instalments. This solution can undoubtedly allow you to increase sales, as customers are often unable to pay inone instalment for budgetary reasons, which leads them to abandon their cart.
Explain to customers how instalment payments work: the interest, the date of the second instalment, etc.
Give a gift or a gift card for every purchase
Who doesn't love presents? Offer your customers a discount code if they make a purchase of at least EUR 60 or offer them a small gift for each purchase made. This initiative will undoubtedly encourage them to make their purchase.
Cross-selling complementary products
Whenever possible, offer complementary products to your customers to remind them to finalise the purchase of a certain product or to encourage them to buy. If you do not mind, propose small reductions for cross-selling, this will certainly be a weapon to push them to also buy the second product. If possible show the advantages of buying the second product as well.
Use e-mail marketing to remind customers of abandoned shopping carts
Use e-mail marketing to remind customers to finalise their purchases, one of the best solutions would be to use special marketing software that will automatically send e-mails to the customer who has abandoned the cart.
This e-mail should preferably be sent a few hours after the cart abandonment so that a large number of customers can be grouped together. You can also use e-mail marketing software, in which you can schedule e-mails to be sent to the customer following cart abandonment.
What leads your customers to abandon their shopping cart?
There are many different reasons why your customers abandon their shopping carts; in the following section we will shed light on some of them.
Extra and unexpected costs
The excessively high cost of shipping is the first reason that makes customers run away, which is why some platforms often offer free shipping to attract customers and push them to finalise their purchase.
Having to create a new account to make a purchase
When a customer enters your platform to make a purchase, he or she expects fast, efficient service and a good customer experience.
If once he fills his shopping cart and starts the purchase process he has to register and create a new account and you also ask him to fill in many sometimes unnecessary and unnecessary fields to finalise his purchase, know that he will not complete his purchase.
Compare prices
Often filling the shopping cart is just a way of benchmarking and comparing product prices between the various e-commerce platforms to launch one's own business or to compare who among the competitors offers the lowest price and make the purchase.
The customer does not find secure payment methods
Payment methods in an e-commerce site are essential elements, and in addition to offering several of them, the security of these must be at the centre so that the customer is reassured and can complete the transaction.
Confusing check out
When the conversion phase becomes confusing and the customer does not get to the final stage due to pop-up windows appearing and numerous offers, they feel annoyed and bored and do not finish the purchase.
No discount coupons to incentivise users to buy
Who doesn't like discounts? Surely it has also happened to you to find a discount and make a purchase even though you had no intention of doing so, it is human we are all attracted by offers and discounts. Getting a discount code will undoubtedly entice your customers to buy.
Buying on the internet is for most users synonymous with buying cheap, in fact if you do not regularly propose offers you know that the probability of purchase will be very low, as the buyer will surely go to a competing site offering discounts.
No clear return terms
Online customers are often reticent to make purchases of which they do not know the return terms. To attract more customers, try to make the procedures for making a return very clear.
If you have made it all the way through, you will certainly have taken advantage of all the tips and best practices to entice your customers to finish their purchases and convert mere visitors into customers. What are you waiting for to get started?
Article translated from Italian