Increasing Sales and Empty Shopping Carts

By Deborah Whitman

Your online store is up and running, and sales are starting to roll in. Now is the time to step back and make sure you avoid a common pitfall for online merchants - abandoned shopping carts. A recent survey by BizRate.com shows that consumers abandon 30% of all online shopping carts without making a purchase.

It's not much better with business-to-business, where shoppers abandon 26% of shopping carts. Clearly online merchants have an opportunity to catch some customers before they head out the store's virtual door without their intended purchases.

Here are eight suggestions for upping the likelihood of shoppers actually purchasing what they pick out in your online store.

Excessive shipping costs were the number 1 reason consumers abandoned carts. Granted, shipping costs need to cover packing materials and transportation, but squeezing extra pounds out of the "handling" charges is annoying to customers and costs sales.

It's also helpful to offer multiple shipping options to meet any need for speed. Be sure to set expectations on next-day shipping, however, as customers may expect to receive an item the following day even if they order late in the day.

BizRate.com says the second major reason online shoppers dumped their carts was that they changed their minds. In my opinion, that means the site didn't work hard enough to close the sale. On each of your product pages, give information that makes the consumer feel so good about their purchase that going through the checkout process seems well worth it:

• Consider hiring a good freelance copywriter, preferably with catalogue experience, to add zing to your product descriptions.
   
• Make sure the product descriptions answer common questions. Ask people to click through your site to see what questions they have.
   
• Include customer comments or reviews about products; providing third-party validation. Otherwise consider linking to third-party product reviews.
   
• Use high-quality photos - this can really help consumers feel comfortable about making an online purchase

Giving a credit card number over the web is still a bit daunting to many consumers. Wait to ask for credit card numbers until the very end, and make sure customers can see the total amount they'll be charged (including all charges for shipping, gift wrap and tax) when they are asked to enter their card number.

Make your online store gift-friendly. Offer gift wrap options and gift cards, and make sure the checkout process includes the option to enter a separate shipping address, so that gifts can go directly to the recipient. Make sure you manage your back-end processes so that a receipt doesn't accompany the gift.

You may have seen people leave a shopping cart full of stuff at the supermarket when the cashier lines appear unbearably long. With online shopping, the equivalent is an unbearably slow checkout process. Before you sign up for a shopping cart service, check the speed of the checkout process by trying out a couple of small-business sites that use their service. Do the pages load quickly? Is the process streamlined and easy?

You can use "buy" buttons to make it easy to get products into the cart. If your site includes a summary page that shows many products as well as detail pages for each product, make sure you have "buy" buttons on both types of page. If possible, create your pages so that the "buy" buttons load first or very early in the process so that if your customers already know what they are going to buy they can do so without waiting for the whole page to load.

Offer more than one payment option. Many people will want to pay online with a credit card, but on the other hand, many buyers are not keen to send their credit card number over the web. Don't lose those sales. Offer a toll-free phone number on your Web site, or, if you cannot staff a real-time phone line, offer an email address and a promise to call the customer back to take the order.

Following through with on-time delivery is crucial to building long-term customers. But according to BizRate.com, nearly 25% of online sales last holiday season did not arrive when expected. One solution is to set delivery expectations to allow for a day of error, so customers will have their expectations met.

So, bar the virtual doors and don't let those consumers leave your web site till they've made their purchases.