I was recently asked the question “how do I reduce my shopping cart abandonment rate?” - this is a tough question to answer with specifics without viewing the site or the analytics surrounding it but for the purpose of this blog, it’s a perfect question. I’m going to walk you through the top 4 basic things you should be looking at, evaluating and solving in order to improve your own abandonment rate. 

1. Where are people dropping off the site?

The best tool to use for looking at stats on your site is Google Analytics. This grants you access to hundreds of thousands of data points and gives you the ability to evaluate data in detail. 

Head over to the behaviour section in Google Analytics and take a look at which pages have the highest % exit. Once you’ve found out where people are dropping off, we can start looking into something called CRO (conversion rate optimisation). This is a basic practice aimed at helping to increase the conversion rate on your site.

There’s likely 2 things going on with your site visitors. They’re either a) dropping off at random points / pages on the site or b) the majority are going to the checkout page and dropping off there. If your visitors are dropping off at seemingly random parts of your site, it likely indicates there is either an issue with your site eg loading time is too long or the website isn’t optimistised for the most common device type (we’ll talk more about this in a second). If traffic is dropping off at the checkout page, this indicates there is an issue on this page specifically. Go through the process yourself to highlight any obvious bugs and check for conversion barriers (up next). 

2. Check for “conversion barriers”

To cut a long story short, the easier you make it for people to convert, the more likely they are to convert. This is why landing pages often work so well for lead generation. Small “conversion barriers” can include things like asking for too many details at the checkout, asking for both billing and shipping addresses separately with no option for “same address” or even something as small as there not being a clear enough box for the addition of a coupon code. 

3. Site speed

Check your site speed and individual page loading speed. Checking your overall site speed will give you a strong idea on how well and fast your site loads but checking individual pages may lead you to the root cause of your shopping cart abandonment - specially if your site is slow at the checkout page.

4. Is your site HTTPS secure?

Security is a huge deal nowadays with many sites still running on old HTTP insecure. Ensure your website is HTTPS secure with a SSL certificate. If you run your site through platforms such as Wix or Squarespace you should get your SSL free with your site. For other platforms such as Wordpress, you may wish to contact your web developer to get one installed.