Did you know that every year abandoned carts cost business owners $4.6 trillion. Yes you read that correctly trillion dollars.
The number one reason people leave a cart is that the user experience is so bad they would rather abandon the purchase than keep on going.
That's right we make it so hard to buy our amazing product or service that even when people want to they'd rather give up, or worse still go somewhere else that makes it easy.
Amazon is a case in point. How many times have you given up on a process because you have an account with them and you know it just takes one click. all the information is already there and ready to go.
Why do people abandon carts?
When we talk about hard what we're really talking about is how easy is it for the user to buy. The user being the definitive word here.
- How many times do they have to click to another screen?
- How many times are they asked to fill in their name?
- How many fields are they asked to fill in?
- Does your cart remember them so they don’t have to keep on repeating the same information if they come back to buy?
These are called points of friction and any one, or all, of them can be perceived by the buyer as one step too many and they'll leave the purchasing process.
Changing just one of those things can dramatically improve your purchase rates.
What can you do to reduce abandoned carts?
The most important thing to focus on is making it easier for a customer to do whatever it is they need / want to do.
In terms of buying from you making the sales process so smooth they hardly move their fingers on the screen or across the keyboard.
In addition don’t make them have to think about anything except that pay now button. You might take their mind off it long enough for them to reconsider.
So don’t leave money on the table.
Examine your process to see if it truly is a smooth ride to the end.
Ps I'll talk about abandoned cart retrieval in the next blog.