Don’t Clear Out the Cart, Even After Your Customer Leaves the Store
Imagine if you could walk into a store, and as you browsed the aisles, throw every item that interested you into a shopping cart. Of course, no one does this in real life, since physically dragging around a giant pile of merchandise you may or may not want is absurd. However, this is the magic of online shopping – customers can put as many items as they want into a digital cart and then walk out of the store without any resentful looks from harassed cashiers and managers. Online shopping is the ultimate browsing experience. Just in the same way that online shoppers do the opposite of what they would in real life, so should you. In a physical store, an abandoned cart would be returned to the cart kiosk. In an online store, you’re better off leaving it as is.
The Small Things Matter
Traditionally, the essential elements to customer retention are good customer service, high quality products, and low prices. Checking out used to be relatively straightforward – the customer would go to the register and pay. However, with eCommerce it’s a different story. Given the increased amount of online shoppers using mobile devices to complete their transactions, you need to ensure that your online checkout process is usable on two different platforms now. Traditional desktop checkout methods aren’t always optimal for mobile, and it’s nothing to dismiss. Shoppers care about the small things, and 33 percent said that a streamlined, user-friendly shopping cart is extremely important, according to an online shopping survey cited by MultiChannelMerchant.com.
Price Comparisons
Shoppers love to compare prices, more so now than ever. Some people won’t complete a purchase if it’s not on sale, and others will wait for markdowns before finishing their shopping. That’s where digital shopping carts come in, and how customers are using them in your online store. Due to the ease with which shoppers can fill a virtual cart, they may also use it to compile a list of items that they will then compare to other prices, according to eMarketer.com. It’s also a convenient way to see your store’s shipping and handling costs. The fact of the matter is that regardless of what the intended use of different features on your store might be, customers are not always going to interact with them in a predictable manner. It’s worth your while to track some of these metrics, like shopping cart abandonment, and how far along in the transaction process a shopper gets before leaving their cart. They may also return for it, so make sure you have a mobile shopping cart system that can save items. If they go off and find that the merchandise they want is a higher price from a different vendor, then you’ve won the battle for their business. The caveat of the victory, though, is that they’re going to want to return to your store and have instant access to the items they’ve already spent time compiling.
Taking the Long Route Around the Store
You may be asking yourself how much of an impact abandoned shopping carts and the ability to recover them has on your online the business. The answer is: a lot. Of all the customers that go to your store to browse and fill their cart with potential purchases, 60 percent of shoppers who start to place items in their cart don’t check out, according to eMarketer.com. That means that these customers are filling the shopping cart without the immediate intention to complete the purchase, though they may. Given how high the numbers are for abandoned carts, you should think ahead about how you can get those customers back to complete their unfinished purchases.
