3 things that are killing your online sales volume
Did you know that 75% of online buyers leave shopping cart page without finalizing their purchases?
It is most commonly known as ‘abandoned cart’. This results in lost sales as buyers seldom return to finalize their purchases. Some online retailers have found incentive techniques to be very helpful with this. For example, when a user leaves shopping cart without finalizing purchase, the retailer’s website automatically sends user an email. The email includes a one-off incentive offer to return and finalize the abandoned cart. Mostly, cash discounts and bonus loyalty points have proved to be effective.
The discount and bonus loyalty incentive offers surely work. After all, everyone loves that extra bit of discounts. However, today we’ll discuss attacking the route cause. With these simple tactics you can improve your website’s checkout process that lead to reduced cart abandonment.
We’ve identified 3 commonly present mistakes on many online shops that result in increased rate of cart abandonment. Let’s look at these problems and apply simple solutions to improve your website’s conversation rate:
1. Slow load times
As you may already know, search giant Google has started to penalize the websites that take longer load times. So, the slower load time surely affects your website’s ranking on Google. Your competitors could take away your sales just by making their websites faster.
However, what is even more serious is the expectations from your website visitors. No one likes to wait these days. Internet speeds are fast and so every website is kind of expected to load quicker. Your website visitors don’t like to wait longer than few milliseconds for website page loads. According to KISSmetrics, Just one second of load delay could end up costing you a big chunk of your online sales.
That is surely not all – a study from Akamai reveals that:
- 40% of website visitors will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online buyers say faster load times are crucial for them to be a returning customers to a site.
Possible solutions
Depending on what’s affecting your website, you could apply some or all of these possible solutions to aid your website’s load speed.
- Implement a content delivery network (CDN) – With a CDN in place, you simply move static content of your website closer to your users and hence the content delivery is faster. The CDN networks take cache of your website’s images, JavaScript and other static HTML and distribute it to their mirror servers around the globe. When a user queries your website, the content is delivered form the closest possible location. This could dramatically improve your website’s speed, especially for those who are located far from your main hosting server. Please read our article on the CDN networks to find out which content delivery network is best suitable for your website.
- Enable compression – you send enormous amount of time ensuring that your website content is useful, relevant and eye catching. In a due process you create large pages, mostly larger than 100kb and there are JavaScript’s, images and lots of stylesheets to be downloaded. Everything you add on your webpage adds to its load time. You can speed up their load time by compressing them – it is just like the content you zip in a folder. The compression reduces your webpage’s HTTP response. You can apply this with Gzip. Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. You do this with Gzip. These days almost every browser supports Gzip, this equates to at least 90% of the modern browsers. It’s a cost-effective and very effective option for speeding up your site.
- Enable browser caching – When someone first time comes to your website, your browser takes the cache and stores it in the history of your browser. So the next time they visit your site, browser can load your webpage without having to send another HTTP request to your server.
- Minify resources – Most websites these days are enabled with CMS (content management system) and with this content entry is easier. However, CMS systems could add that extra bit of html to your web pages. To find out if your website already uses minify rule or if you need to apply it, please visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights . Here you’ll find out everything that you need to know about minifying and improving your website’s load speed.
- Optimize images – This is one of the common mistakes that online retailers upload larger size images then required. It may still appear smaller depending on the size allocated on a web page but behind the scenes you are actually loading a large scale images. For example, you may be loading 2200p x 2200p image in a 400p x 400p box. So it is always best to resize your images before upload. Find out the common ratio and biggest required size on your website and then upload accordingly. In other words, crop your images to the correct size.
2. Not so prominent call-to-action buttons
You might think that it’s a small thing and not worth worrying about. However, one thing we all should know is that online shopping is very different from physical retail store. If I am on one physical retail store, it takes me time to leave that and go to another. I’ve to find the store, then find parking and then go inside the store and all over again explain my requirement.
It’s not the same for online shopping. If I find that website I am on is defficult to navigate, it doesn’t take me long to leave it. I simply close the web page, search for the product in google and there I have 100s if not 1000s of prospective sellers of the same product. The ease of moving between websites make your visitors so intolerant about these small things.
You’ll be surprised that online shoppers will almost immediately leave your website if it is difficult for them to find the shopping cart button that shows how many products are added to the cart. They will also leave your website if it is not obvious that products they clicked to add to the cart are successfully added. There are many websites out there with a barely emphasized shopping cart button that doesn’t turn attention to itself.
Possible solution:
It is very important to make it super obvious to your site visitor that they’ve successfully put something in their shopping cart.
As you may have noticed it on many successful websites, creating a pop-up or animation showing product being added to the cart is a great idea. However, depending on your website’s architecture, it may require some detailed makeover.
If you prefer not to spend on such detailed work, there is also an easier workaround. Simply make your shopping cart button prominent and make the cart count stand out. If it is noticeable, users will know that their cart entry is successful. This also helps them find out where to click once their shopping is complete. This can be achieved with simple CSS and JQuery skills.
3. Compulsory and lengthy registrations
When was the last time you enjoyed filling out forms? Well, registration forms on your website are the same. So, unless it is super important, do not include a question in your registration form. Also, not everyone wants to register. According to a study by eConsultancy, as high as 25% shoppers abandon shopping cart because of the forced and lengthy account registrations.
Your online customers want to add items they like to the cart, pay for their purchases and move on to the next thing of their choosing. They would probably like to continue watching that stand up show or a parody on the YouTube that they paused to visit your site. Long story short, no one wants to spend time filling out lengthy forms.
Possible solution:
To ensure that your checkout process is conversion friendly, make account creation as short as possible. Remove any and all unnecessary fields from the form. Also, it is very important that you make account creation optional. Offer guest checkout to your website visitors so that they can finalize their purchases on your website without registering an account.
Conclusion
A checkout process is a checkout process, there’s not much you can be creative with. However, let’s use simple logic and try to make it as simple and easy as possible. These small tweaks can help you gain a huge positive difference to your bottom line.