Keep ‘Em in the Cart 

If you’ve got a shopping cart – or bag or basket or whatever – you’re probably aware of a little problem.  Not everyone who enters your checkout process manages to complete it.  That’s why, when I talk about the buying process, I make a distinction between deciding to buy and actually completing the purchase.

Between those two acts, your visitor must navigate the obstacle course of your shopping cart process, yet another contained conversion system (typically a third-party software solution) that requires multiple clicks and the willingness to part with some amount of personal information.

But, like I said.  You are probably intimately aware of your shopping cart abandonment rates, because you monitor this sort of useful information.  Right?  Of course you do.

So today I’m going to ask you this question:  Should you be turning your attention to refurbishing your shopping cart? 

A Matter of Priorities

It’s an important question: before you do anything, decide if the next issue you need to address is shopping cart abandonment.  Yes, you are losing folks there.  Everyone does.  There is no 100% conversion rate because this is not a perfect world.  Even when you’ve covered every base imaginable, humans will still leave for reasons you can’t do anything about.

But if your Web site is typical, you don’t lose the majority of folks from your shopping cart.  You lose them much earlier in the process – at the home page, or just a page or two in.  If this is you, I’d say your efforts are better spent, for now, encouraging more folks to stay with your buying/selling process. 

Because fewer folks bail out of your shopping cart compared to the number who bail out before they even get to checkout, improving your abandonment rates might take you from, let’s say, 3% to 3.3%.  Sure, the difference is not to sneeze at.  But keeping more visitors in your conversion process from the get go helps you increase your conversion rate by multiples.

The Metrics to Help You Decide 

If you are on top of your Web analytics, you’ll know where your biggest problems are.  These are the key metrics that will help you decide where you should be directing your energies.

• Single Page Access.  This is a percentage of the number of people who landed on a particular page – it might be your home page or it could just as easily be a landing page – and made it their first and last page.   In other words, they came, they saw, they bailed. 

You really want to consider these pages before anything else.  What is wrong and how can you remedy it?  I mean, we’re talking folks who weren’t even inspired to look a single page further into your site!

• Scenario Analysis.  Ideally, you want to be able to follow your visitor’s path through your Web site.  Is he clicking where you want him to click? Is he following the breadcrumb trail you have so painstakingly crafted for him, only to jump ship on the fourth page?

If they don’t get to the shopping cart, you certainly don’t need to worry about them abandoning it.  But let’s give them the chance.  Look at the pages they reject and evaluate how to improve things.

• Shopping Cart Abandonment.  This isn’t simply how many people don’t complete the process, although that’s the number we seem to care about.  Truth is, by itself it doesn’t tell you much about what might be wrong.  A checkout process can be a number of steps, and each step is its own little mini-conversion.  You really want to know where in the shopping cart folks get frustrated enough to say goodbye, because that’s the point where the cart’s conversion process is failing.

How Much Money’s Left on the Table?

We get lots of questions about how to solve the problem of shopping cart abandonment.  But sometimes you don’t necessarily need an answer to this question – you need a better question. 

Much better results, relatively speaking, can be yours through providing relevant and persuasive content throughout your Website: content that is based on an understanding of your visitors’ intentions and needs, content that instills confidence, content that reassures, content that makes an emotional connection.  Visitors who have been thoroughly persuaded demonstrate uncanny motivation to navigate even the worst checkout process!

But, let’s face it. Money on the table is money that isn’t in your pocket.  So, if you’ve got a tidy little cybershop and want to improve your shopping cart abandonment rates, then I’ve got any number of ideas for you.  Next time!

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