Raising conversion rates, even by a few points, is one of the top ways to positively impact your company’s revenue. This is especially true in the complex, multi-channeled, modern sales ecosystem.
When seeking to improve online conversion rates, it’s essential to examine every aspect of the sales cycle closely. One of the most important, and often neglected, aspects is the checkout experience, where complications cause high cart abandonment rates.
“17% of abandoned carts are directly attributed to long or complicated checkout processes.”
Baymard Research
Improving the checkout experience has a major impact on cart abandonment. By solving the top reasons for cart abandonment, both B2C and B2B brands greatly increase their bottom line revenue.
Top Reasons for Cart Abandonment During Checkout
Check out the solutions below to reduce cart abandonment and optimize your checkout experience.
Extra Costs (shipping, tax, fees)
Extra Costs in the form of shipping, taxes, and fees are the top reason for cart abandonment.
Key Solutions:
- Display “free shipping” parameters (e.g. “add $X.00 more to your order and receive free shipping!”)
- Link to unique instructions/processes for tax-exempt customers
Account Creation Requirement
Requiring people to create an account, although beneficial in the long term, often leads to cart abandonment.
Key Solutions:
- Add an option to “continue as a guest”
- Provide incentives to create an account (e.g. free shipping, discount, etc.)
- If account creation is an absolute requirement, consider allowing clients to “opt-out” of future contact/marketing campaigns
Lack of Trust
When people don’t trust a website, they’re quick to abandon their digital shopping cart during checkout.
Key Solutions:
- Display credit card fraud solutions (e.g. all transactions secured by Signifyd) and link to additional information
Long/Complicated Checkout
People expect an easy, streamlined checkout experience. Long, complicated processes drastically decrease conversion rates.
Key Solutions:
- Segment your checkout processes. B2B clients may need the longer checkout process, but “guests” or casual purchasers might prefer a single-page process.
- Survey your customers/segments to assess their checkout preferences.
Couldn’t See/Calculate the Total Order Cost
As people shop, whether it’s for business or pleasure, they want to know how much they’re going to spend.
Key Solutions:
- Implement or activate “cart summary” functionality that allows users to keep track of items and total cost
- A simple feature that allows customers to hover over the cart and see “2 items – $48.00” is often sufficient
Website had Errors/Crashed
Nobody likes errors, especially during the checkout process.
Key Solutions:
- Create a maintenance plan for your website to ensure that security patches, upgrades, extensions, and content are up to date and free of conflicts
Payment Method Limitations
In the digital world, people expect payment to pay using their own methods, they like to calculate cost up-front, and they don’t like it when their credit card is declined.
Key Solutions:
- Segment your checkout processes for different customer types
- B2B clients look for payment options such as purchase order or line of credit
- B2C customers look for newer payment options such as pay-over-time and cryptocurrency
Schedule a Free Checkout Experience Assessment
We invite you to schedule a free assessment of your checkout experience. The assessment will include an analysis of your current checkout experience and recommendations for improvement.
We’ll evaluate:
• Technical performance and security
• Your checkout experience benchmarked against competitors / similar businesses
• Experience benchmarked against similar customer segments and product sets
• Payment, shipping, and checkout content
• Current challenges you’re experiencing
After a 30-minute call to gather information from your team, we’ll then perform an assessment and deliver your analysis and recommendations.
