How eCommerce Professionals Can Reduce Checkout Abandonment Rates

If you own or work for an eCommerce website (small or large), chances are that a significant percentage of your prospective customers are getting to your checkout page and then leaving in droves. Let’s take a look at the art of reducing checkout abandonment and how you can fix it — starting today.

Statistics on the percentage of abandoned shopping carts are staggering — from over 75% according to SalesCycle, to a low of around 60% according to MarketingSherpa. Whatever the exact figure is, it’s bad.

Understand Why Customers Are Leaving

Research shows that the number one reason consumers leave eCommerce websites during the check-out process is because of "extra costs too high" (i.e. shipping, tax, fees). These are followed by the website asking you to register an account (the lack of a ‘guest checkout’ option), long and complicated checkout processes, not being ready to purchase, high product prices, the need for a Save/Wishlist feature and more.

One such research study was conducted by the Baymard Institute in 2016 with 1,044 response participants throughout the US.

Source: Baymard Institute, Reasons for abandonments during checkout research study

Similar research findings were uncovered by Forrester Research, BI Intelligence, VWO and many other firms.

When VWO surveyed participants in 2016, they found the most commonly cited reasons for website visitors not completing their purchases online were:

A thorough usability study conducted by the Baymard Institute found a whopping 520+ usability-related issues concerning the checkout process — and these were on big-name shopping sites like 1-800-Flowers, Levi’s, and Apple. You’d think they’d know better, right? It just goes to show that a poor customer checkout experience isn’t limited to SMBs.

The good news is that all of these issues can be fixed, leading to a smoother, more seamless checkout process. Of course, it’s one thing to tell you why customers are leaving, but it’s another thing entirely to guide you through how to fix the issues that cause them to give up.

Let's go through some of the biggest problems and how to fix them.

Extra Taxes, Slow Shipping and High Shipping Costs

With the rise of Amazon Prime offering free two-day shipping on everything from electronics to pet food, it’s easy to see how customers have adapted to expecting things to be here sooner rather than later. But you’re not Amazon, so does that mean you have to simply deal with disappointing customers with slow or high shipping costs? Not necessarily.

The Solution

Depending on where your business is based, you may be able to work with local couriers to help streamline your shipping process. Traditionally, this would require a heavy investment in customized, in-house software to pack and track items, which is the route that Amazon took. Thankfully for the rest of us, there are plenty of specialized shipping software solutions that integrate the most popular couriers in your local geography while enabling you to manage tracking, shipping, inventory and in some cases, even accounting and fleet management.

And while there’s not much you can do about high taxes (short of setting up shop elsewhere), you can help soften the blow through the strategic use of coupons and geo-fencing, which involves defining a perimeter area that notifies customers in that area of special deals and discounts.

One of Australia’s leading eCommerce retail brands not only offers free shipping over a certain amount, but tells you how much to add to your card in order to qualify for it. By offering multiple payment options (including AliPay), they open themselves up to flexibility of payment methods.

But perhaps the biggest and most impactful change you can make (if at all financially feasible) is to offer free shipping, which is the biggest contributor by far to higher conversion rate numbers. Just how far are customers willing to go for free shipping?

You may be surprised.

According to a ComScore study, 90% of customers surveyed would take significant actions to qualify for free shipping, including 58% who said they would add more items to their cart in order to qualify, and half who said they would choose the slowest shipping option.

Website Issues: Slow Loading Time, Crashes, Complex Checkout

On the other side of the spectrum are website-specific issues often related to the shopping cart platform or the technology that powers the site itself. There are two issues here — the speed of the website and the speed of the checkout process. Both can affect customers interchangeably.

For loading issues, it’s worth checking out what could be causing the slow page loading speeds. You can do that with tools such as GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. Both tools will give you useful tips on how to make your pages load faster. For comparison, look at how they checked Amazon.com:

While there's some skill in knowing which of these may be 'false positives', GTMetrix provides a wealth of information on where to start in terms of improving performance and load speed (which can be a complicated subject). Best-practices like using CSS sprites are useful opportunities for load speed optimization (although not so commonly applied).

The Solution

Since this is SitePoint, I won't go into detail with what's necessary to fix each of these problems — but if you run into any difficulties, grab your nearby server administrator and fellow front-end devs and start working through each. Failing that, doing a Google search for "fixing [issue]" and the relevant reading can be used to solve almost any load speed issue.

Even if your page is blazingly fast, what about the checkout process itself? Unusually complex checkouts, a lack of guest registration and even requesting too much information on the checkout form are small but nevertheless significant areas of concern for customers.

According to the Baymard Institute’s Usability Report, customers also have issues with checkout in terms of inputting their shipping and billing information. Things that should be common sense rarely are, and instead add enough minor irritation to sour the customer experience altogether. We’re talking about missed improvements like:

• Making shipping address the same as billing address by just clicking a checkbox
• Preserving information entered in forms even when there’s one or more errors
• Auto-detecting city and state/province after postal code is entered
• Clearly labeling which fields are required and which are optional
• Only asking for the same information one time (such as name, email address, address, username/password)

Here's one example of a well-thought out check-out process:

Kogan.com, Australia's largest online department store, has a streamlined and simplified check-out process. They've gone for a multi-step check-out process (allowing for cart recovery e-mails if a visitor drops out after 'Step 1'). The elegant usage of HTML5 placeholders for each form field, clear reminders of what's in the cart, total order value and total delivery cost instill trust in the customer. The usage of the word "Secure" prior to Checkout also instils trust. You can get through the checkout faster by using a social login such as Facebook or PayPal. They've also used the word "Continue" rather than "Submit" for the primary call-to-action button.

Getting to the "Thank-You" Page

Getting to the Thank You page is a customer’s end goal, but many sites throw up every conceivable hurdle to try and prevent them from doing that. One common complaint from users is that the checkout process requires too much information. While most shopping carts have a fairly standard and unassuming billing/shipping detail window, there is certainly room for improvement.

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by James Spittal via SitePoint