5 ways to prevent cart abandonment and increase conversion
People buy online because it’s convenient. The thing is, though, often it’s not. As high as 80% of online shoppers are putting items into carts but not clicking the buy button. Cart abandonment doesn’t have to be the end of the story, though: it’s an opportunity to add value to your customers through improving your checkout and website. Below, we’ll give you tips on how to prevent cart abandonment and help increase your conversion.
Be clear about shipping, and other costs
Everyone likes surprises, except when they involve paying more money than expected. This is why having unexpected or hidden costs is a major factor in cart abandonment. And when it comes to these costs, people really don’t like unexpected shipping charges, or any at all, for that matter.
The obvious solution is to offer free shipping, but if you can’t, or really don’t want to, you can:
– Integrate shipping costs into prices
– Charge a standard fee
Either way, these costs should be clear on your website. If you’re open with your customer, they’ll more likely buy from you because it’ll signal to them that you care about their buying experience. In fact, you should be clear about any extra costs, like taxes, your customers will have to pay because no one likes coughing up more money than they’d anticipated.
Offer a good payments mix
The payment options themselves are an important part of the checkout process. After all, customers can’t pay without them, but not having the right ones will send them looking for another webshop.
What are the “right” ones?
Every country and region has its own online payment methods that people know and trust. Meaning you as a merchant basically can’t do without them if you want to do business there. For example, pretty much everyone in the Netherlands uses iDEAL to buy online, making it non-negotiable for merchants in that market. Besides trusted local methods, you should also offer clients other key methods that give them payment flexibility, such as credit cards, pay later solutions, and mobile wallets.
Having a good payments mix sends a signal that you’re there for them, and value making their experience as convenient as possible. And at Mollie, we have a variety of local and other popular payment methods to cover your needs, so your customers don’t go searching for what they want somewhere else.
Allow check out without creating an account
Imagine: you’ve found precisely what you want, and then you have to create an account and enter a bunch of information. You shouldn’t have to go through an information obstacle course to get it. And indeed, many customers leave the checkout process if they have to make an account.
The solution?
Give your customers an account creation-free checkout. This reduces the number of steps they have to take when buying, which means it’s easier for them to make purchases.
Become mobile-friendly
Mobile phones are everywhere and people do everything on them, especially shop. Every year, more and more people are hopping on their smartphones to buy. In this environment, having a mobile-friendly checkout is an easy way to keep customers happily buying from your webshop.
At Mollie, we have a super smooth checkout that works and looks great on mobile, and is a standard part of what we offer. Read more about how to keep customers happy with mobile-friendly webshops.
Keep customers on your site
Redirecting while paying is one of the biggest conversion killers because it takes your customers away from your trusted environment and to another, unexpected, one. This makes them doubt, and when this happens, the chance is high they won’t complete their order.
And since you want to keep people buying from you, one of the easiest ways to ensure this is to literally keep them on your site during payment.
That’s why we’ve created Mollie Components for credit cards. It’s an easy-to-implement solution that takes on your website’s design, giving it the same look and feel, reassuring customers it’s safe to pay. But if you’re a bit more technically-inclined, we have an API you can go wild with and create an awesome checkout flow. Both of these tools will help increase conversion by giving your customers a higher quality user experience.