Posts Tagged ‘shopping cart optimization’
What’s a Shopping Cart?
Shopping cart software like any other, i.e. Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart etc, facilitates the customers during the shopping process. Bargainers can utilize shopping cart solutions in online stores to sell goods or services. E-Commerce software makes shopping a regular, non-stressful operation. To make a long story short, shopping cart possesses plenty of user-friendly features strengthened by charming design. The majority of them provide such useful options as unlimited auto responders, send e-mail function, digital transfer, ad pursuit, divided experiment, listing control and marketing tools.
The shopping cart software offers enumerable boons and built-in safety options minimizing the probability of identity theft during personal details verification.
In this entry we will take up essential questions concerning checkout optimization. Following these 10 easy steps you will reduce the frequency of checkout denial and raise the conversion.
Checkout Specifications
It’s not an easy business to urge a customer buy from you. Cart optimization may help a lot in the achieving of the goal. If you manage to ruin customers’ mental blocks such as: lack of trust, uncertainty of getting a good deal and confusion, you will get the deserved award in the form of increased number of purchases and a crowd of content clients. The configuration of your shopping cart also really matters. It is a proven fact that traditional 4-step checkouts seem much more acceptable and intelligible for the customers in comparison with more complicated ones, demanding more detailed information. A regular checkout usually includes the following steps:
1. Shopping cart page;
2. Billing info page;
3. Shipping info page;
4. Payment page and “Thank you page”.
These steps are well-known to the customers that’s why they seem more safe than any new usability methods.
Why do Users Abandon Checkouts?
Actually, purchase of high-priced products entails more comprehensive checkout process for provision of customer’s assurance and security. So, it’s quite sensible that inexpensive goods are in advantageous situation due to more compact online shopping carts offering swift checkouts with minimal quantity of steps. Today, one step checkout enjoys increasing popularity, as the user shouldn’t go through several pages when buying a product; all information is inserted into the form fitting into one page. Unfortunately, there is a great number of reasons why shopping carts are rejected by the users, we stated the most frequent ones in the list below.
Reasons why users abandon checkouts:
high rate for shipping and handling;
product price turns out to be higher than expected;
shipping and handling rates were indicated too late in the checkout process;
too much information is required during the checkout;
low bandwidth resulting in slow page loading;
not enough information about the product/service;
no desire to pass the registration process;
absence of corresponding payment options;
visitor is not ready to make a purchase yet.
Doing away with these reasons you will be able to create a user-friendly UX for the customers. Follow this link “Designing a Shopping Cart Page” if you want to know more about design and functionality of a shopping cart, the post will reveal all tips and tricks.
The Question is: “… to Optimize or not to Optimize…”
Shopping cart conversion rates and success of the order checkout process are influenced by many particular business factors such as type of products, general eCommerce site quality, limpidity and visibility of shipping, etc. Here are some standard requirements for eCommerce websites in overall performance: order checkout forms must load under 10 seconds and a shopping cart should operate when cookies are disabled. Use these tricks to optimize the cart and improve the conversion rates:
1. Keep Highlighting Items in the Cart
It’s inadmissible to remove a thumbnail product image from the basket, as its absence can double the cart abandonment rate. You can also indicate the date and time of product addition. It’s recommended to show how much money is saved if the customer gets a discount for a definite product. Customers want to see as much information as possible even on the last stage of the purchase process, typing a credit card number.
