How to Tweak Your Shopping Cart to Minimize Bounce Rate

You’ve worked so hard to encourage your customers to go so far as to make it to the shopping cart. Unfortunately, as many as three-quarters of shopping carts are abandoned for a variety of reasons. These represent a lot of missed sales that could have lined the pockets of many eCommerce website owners.

Given this stat, it’s important to take steps to minimize this bounce rate. Here are the top shopping cart abandonment issues and how to rectify them.

Creating an Account

One of the more popular reasons for abandoned carts is the need to create an account. In fact, about one-third of consumers who abandon their carts did so for this very reason. To fix this problem, allow guest check-outs for items in the cart, which can avoid this annoyance for buyers. Until you’ve become big enough – such as Amazon – adding a guest checkout component should improve cart conversion.

Complex Checkout Process

A complicated checkout is the second most popular reason for shopping cart abandonment. The more fields that have to be filled out and steps that have to be performed, the more likely consumers will abandon their carts out of sheer frustration. After setting up your cart through http://1shoppingcart.com/packages, it should be short and quick, and optimized to cut back on the number of steps and amount of info that customers are presented with. People shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to make a purchase.

Costs Aren’t Easily Available Right Away

Almost a quarter of shoppers who abandon their carts do so because they find it hard to determine all the costs associated with a transaction. Customers are more willing to do business with you if you are transparent and offer accurate pricing upfront. Any extra costs will sour the deal and lead to items left behind in shopping carts. Any discounts promised should be displayed and applied automatically, and any shipping costs should also be displayed clearly.

Long Website Load Time

The longer it takes your website to load, the more likely consumers will be to bail on their carts. More specifically, any more than an eight-second load time will almost surely send people in the opposite direction, and bounce rates increase for sites that take more than four seconds to load. Be sure to optimize your pages to reduce load time, including file sizes of images and compression of data resources. Every second that goes by increases the likelihood that buyers will choose someplace else to go.