After putting a ton of thought into your sales offers, it can be disheartening to have customers abandon the shopping cart at the point of sale. However, the problem might not be in your offerings, but instead in your web design. To improve your conversion rate and avoid high cart abandonment statistics on your site, adopt some of these best practices in your web design.

6 Tips to Improve Your Shopping Cart Closings

To understand what is going on with high shopping cart abandonment statistics, you will need to do a little investigative work. However, the work can also apply to your online business marketing strategies, thus serving a double function. To understand what is working in your small business web design and what is derailing, try looking at these six possibilities:

1. Predicting Customer Behavior – Your web design should enable a potential buyer to close the sale, however, sometimes the funnel isn’t flowing smoothly either because of slow load times on specific pages or broken links. By reviewing Google Analytics reporting, you get a bird’s eye view of what happened right before a customer abandoned the site or shopping cart. If they spent too much time on a page, it could be it wasn’t loading quickly. If they hit a broken link, they may have gotten frustrated and abandoned the site completely. Try to identify what pages they visited and what happened prior to the issue so that you know how to predict future behavior with your shopping cart abandonment solutions to improve the web design.

2. Registration Issues – Maybe the problem isn’t in the shopping cart itself, but in the registration process to get to the shopping cart. E-commerce sites that force registration can often frustrate buyers that don’t want to give out personal details before they’ve decided to buy. The shopping cart should still be available for them to be able to add and remove items and see how your deals stack up. Don’t make them register with all their full details until absolutely necessary and they won’t hit a roadblock that makes them want to quit the process early.

3. No Visible Progress Indicators – A customer who is going through the shopping cart process wants to know how much longer before they’re done. Add a progress indicator and break down the shopping cart experience into quantified steps that they can follow. This way, they aren’t left wondering if they have time to finish the buy before they have to pick up their kid or finish their lunch at work.

4. Limited Ability to Make and Save Changes – The shopping cart should be easily changed for picky buyers who are dropping items or adding them as they go along. If the reload times take too long or the changes are not saved, a customer is likely to abandon the cart because it’s not easy to work with as they change their mind during shopping. If a customer leaves the site and comes back later, they want to see the same items they had before in the shopping cart in their first visit, instead of requiring them to enter them again.

   

5. Web Content and Features That Reassure Customers – Even though more and more people are becoming comfortable with online buying, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to prove your worth or provide evidence that you are safe to do business with online. Small business web design, in particular, needs to show they are as security conscious as the big guys by advertising VeriSign logos on their pages or creating a page of testimonials of good shopping experiences. If your shopping cart has a way for people to review their purchases, it can help spur sales. People want to avoid buyer’s remorse for deals that got away because they were too slow to snatch them up. Offer price guarantees and detail the types of warranties available with a purchase.

6. Pinpoint Errors at Checkout – If a customer makes an error in paying, you don’t want the cart to start over. Instead, the system should know which fields are causing the errors and highlight them so that the customer can make the needed corrections and the payment process can continue unhindered. Another way to avoid errors is to automatically fill in fields, like zip codes, and use drop-down lists for states. Bad coupon codes can also cause errors and should give a message to the customer if the coupon is expired or invalid, so they aren’t left wondering what’s wrong with the cart. As always, provide other options for purchasing on your website, like a chat window or phone number, in the event that someone does have an issue you aren’t aware of and still wants to make the purchase by going another route.

What Works in Web Design

Online business marketing strategies that improve transparency will also reduce shopping cart abandonment. If you keep the customer informed of the buying process and offer as many payment options as possible, you can increase your sales dramatically because you appear more genuine and trustworthy. Check Google Analytics reporting to pinpoint bottlenecks and eliminate them. Reduce the need for excessive registration details and understand the types of behavior that lead to shopping cart abandonment so that you can address them fully in your small business web design.

Riya Sander is now working in a position of marketing supervisor for Web123, one of the fast-growing web design companies in Australia. She holds a bachelor’s of Business Administration(Marketing). Apart from her marketing expertise, she always enjoys reading, cooking, pocketbooks and playing with her cat on weekends. Twitter.