How to optimise your shopping cart

If you think you have to stop selling once a product has been added to a visitors’ cart, you have to think again. Cart abandonment rate (that is when created shopping carts or payment pages are exited) can be as high as 95% and getting this percentage down will have the single biggest effect on your bottom line. Reason for this is that a 10% improvement on the home page might get more click-throughs, but it doesn’t necessarily yield 10% more in sales. However, a 10% higher completion at the cart level is directly impacting your bottom line with a 10% increase in turnover!

First let’s start with telling you the three dangers with a shopping cart:
1. Seller focused thinking. The cart is simply seen as a tool to get the money in for the seller
2. So called buyers remorse. This needs to be addressed quickly before the cart gets abandoned
3. Cart clarity. The steps in the checkout process need to be clearly numbered. Ask name and email address in first step, so you already have that in case something goes wrong. This allows you to follow up with the customer when they abandon the cart. It is important to make sure this data autofills on the next page.

This said, how do we actually increase a shopping cart’s conversion rate and ensure the abandonment goes down. Here are a few easy, quick steps you can implement:

1. Know your shopping cart abandonement rate
You might think this is obvious and if it is, great! Most people do now know their exact cart abandonment rate. You have to know exactly what this is in order to establish a base to work from. A great start finding this is using the stats program in you shopping cart package or use the Ecommerce feature in Google Analytics.

2. Maintain forward momentum
Shopping carts should be treated as just another step in the sales process. Simply compare this to offline behavior. The transaction is not complete until the money has been transferred. Great staff at bricks and mortar shops (especially the more upmarket ones where there is a higher transaction rate involved) make sure they keep making you feel great all the way to the checkout! The best ones even beyond that, but that is a completely new subject for another blog post (after sales service increasing repeat sales). Online this checkout process should not take longer than 3 minutes; test this.

3. Add testimonials to checkout page
A great way to keep ensuring your prospects they are in the process of making the right decision is by adding testimonials to your checkout page. Just when they start to feel a bit more insecure about what they are about to purchase, they notice a few testimonials from very happy customers. What more to say.

4. Add a product image to your checkout page
Often overlooked, but very important. When going through the checkout process, people will think: “What am I buying again?”, especially when the buy was strongly emotionally driven. Showing a product image will give them the trust they are buying a tangible product and they are doing the right thing.

5. Take away all the risk of buying
Last but not least. Even if your visitors feel 100% confident buying your product, there will still be the question: “What is I do not like it after all?”. You can instantly take away this concern and objection by offering a clearly stated 100% money back guarantee, ideally using an image like the one on the right here.

Important:make sure you optimize your own shopping cart not only by implementing these tips, but also by testing them against each other and other tips you will have read online, using tools like Google Optimizer and Omniture. This is the only way you can make sure that you are making the right adjustments to your cart.

Cornelis Boertjens is Website Conversion Specialist at Catchi. Catchi helps companies to optimize their website conversion rates, resulting in a higher percentage of visitors taking the action they desire. Catchi is a dedicated specialist in Website Conversion optimisation, which is a science and an art that requires a specialist team to get companies the best and fastest results.

For more information refer to Catchi's website: www.catchiwebsiteconversion.com or email Cornelis directly at cornelis@catchiwebsiteconversion.com