Best Shopping Cart Optimization Practices to Drive More Sales

Although there are many ecommerce best practices for increasing sales, cart abandonment is a common problem.

While there are many reasons why a customer can abandon the shopping cart, having a poor checkout process is the most common one. The majority of e-commerce websites have a complicated checkout process which can easily irritate a customer, making him abandon the cart behind.

A recent study shows that almost 76% of customers abandon their shopping cart during the time of checkout. It means that more than half of the customers never complete their purchases, which eventually lowers the conversion rates for the e-commerce website.

If your online shop’s sales have been fluctuating up and down, you may need to focus on providing customers with a better checkout experience. To do so, you can optimize your shopping cart so that customers won’t have to sit through the never-ending checkout process.

Some of the best shopping cart optimization practices include:

1. Support Guest Login

Here’s the thing…

Not every customer is going to share their personal information on your website. Customers are getting more and more aware of information theft and therefore don’t prefer sharing their personal information, especially on a new e-commerce website.

So, there’s no point in forcing your customers to sign up before placing an order. Support guest login through your website so that customers who don’t want to sign up can also place an order.

 

Guest login can help you nurture a healthy relationship with your customers. So, make sure that your website supports guest logins.

 

2. Free Shipping and Free Returns

One of the major reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart is additional shipping charges which appear at the time of checkout. These shipping charges can drastically increase the overall cart value, eventually resulting in cart abandonment.

Rather support free shipping on your website so that customers won’t have to pay any additional charges for shipping. As surprising as it may sound, providing free shipping can easily skyrocket your online sales.

 

 

 

 

 

So, stop irritating your customers with additional shipping charges and provide your customers with free shipping.

 

3. Make Forms Easy to Fill

The most frustrating thing for a customer is to fill out those lengthy forms during the time of checkout. Not only these forms take too much time to fill, but some of the columns in the form also have no significance whatsoever.

Therefore, make sure that each form on your website is as short as possible. You can reduce the form length by removing the unnecessary fields which are not necessary for the purchase.

Using the best copywriting services may reduce the length of unnecessary forms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, you can also use Google Autofill in your forms so that customers won’t have to fill general information like their name, email id, contact details, etc. as they are automatically fetched from Google’s server. This makes it easy for the customers to fill out forms without having to experience too much hassle.

 

4. Assist Customers With Special Discounts/Coupons

Among all the online buyers, the majority prefer online shopping for special discounts. In fact, one
of the major reasons why customers choose online shopping over buying products from a local store is extra discount online shops offer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, if customers don’t know the exact discount for a particular product, they’re likely to leave their cart without buying anything. So, ensure that you assist customers with every discount you offer on your website.

Furthermore, it’s also a good practice to tell customers about the special discount they’ll get if they increase the cart value, i.e., add more items to their cart. This will help you increase your website’s conversions, thereby increasing the overall revenue.

 

5. Use Push Notifications to Remind Customers About the Abandoned Cart

There are many instances when customers unintentionally abandon their cart and forget about it in the future. As an online seller, it’s your job to remind customers about their carts via push notifications. Push Notification is quite a helpful feature for e-commerce websites as it allows you to notify customers about the items in their cart, new offers, latest items, etc.

However, it is worth noting that unnecessarily sending notifications to the customers can also irritate them. Even though push notification is a great step towards establishing a good customer relationship, overdoing it is not a good practice and therefore, must be avoided at every cost.

 

Final Words

Abandoned Carts are among the major issues faced by e-commerce businesses. However, by using the above-mentioned tactics, you can easily optimize your website’s shopping cart so that customers don’t leave the cart without completing the purchase.

Shopping cart optimization not only helps you improve the overall sales of your e-commerce store but also helps you nurture long-term relations with the customers. If your website’s shopping cart is fully optimized, i.e., offers an exceptional shopping experience, the customer is most likely to come back to your website in the future.

Cart optimization is one of the best strategies of making your online business more successful.