A dilemma that every eCommerce store faces is to have your customers abandon their cart just before heading to the checkout page. Unfortunately, this can happen quite a lot and it can be a huge leak in your sales funnel if you don’t find a solution for it.
Thankfully, there are a number of ways that you can use to reduce cart abandonment and increase your chances of a successful purchase and hopefully plug any leaks in your sales funnel.
If you’re thinking to yourself “Hey, I’m just a small online store that’s running on WooCommerce, what can I do?”
Worry not!
A lot of the tips that we’re covering in this article are fairly easy to implement and will not put a huge strain on your budget. If you’re ready, then let’s get started!
Use a plugin
The average store loses about 68% of its potential sales due to cart abandonment. Trying to find ways to reduce that number can be hard, especially if you don’t have any clue on what to do.
With platforms such as WordPress and WooCommerce, you can easily solve those cart abandonment issues by using cart recovery plugins for your website.
Plugins such as Advanced Cart Recovery for WordPress or
WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart can help you reduce the rate of customers abandoning their cart just before checkout.
Both plugins will perform functions such as emailing customers who abandoned their cart during a transaction or saving the contents of a user’s cart to keep your cart abandonment rate down. And, since both are popular plugins, you can easily install them on your managed hosted WordPress website and start customizing and tailoring it to your needs.
Give shipping discounts
One of the major reasons why customers tend to hesitate on a purchase is the shipping costs. If you’re an online store that’s focusing on an international market, odds are shipping will be a huge expense that customers need to consider when making their purchase, even if your product offers a good bargain in the first place.
You need a shipping strategy for your online store!
Giving discounts on shipping or offering free shipping straight out can be a great way to encourage the customer to complete the sale and will likely make them come back for another purchase down the road.
Use banners on your main page to show that you’re giving discounts or free shipping, so customers will know precisely what they’re getting when they load up your eCommerce website.
Just remember that this will be an investment as you might have to cover the cost of shipping. However, it will be something worthwhile to split test and discern if there’s any notable difference in your conversions.
Make checkout easier
The last thing that a customer would want is to feel stuck at the checkout page because it’s taking too long. Users today expect their shopping experience to be seamless and streamlined. So, if they end up in a lengthy checkout process, they’ll probably just say “Screw it,” and just leave the site before completing the transaction.
Having a good checkout page and process is essential for an eCommerce site. Avoid having multiple pages on your checkout page as it gives your potential customer more chances to abandon their cart.
Keep your checkout simple using a few pages with all the necessary details such as payment details and email accounts. The other thing you need to consider is using a reliable WooCommerce hosting for your store (as opposed to free web hosting services) to ensure that your site doesn’t suffer any slowdown.
Send a little email reminder
There will be times when a customer will leave your site during a transaction for reasons beyond your control. Maybe they were called away during the checkout process? Maybe their internet got cut off? Or maybe they just needed more time to think about the purchase.
Whatever the reason, you should always remember that just because a customer abandons their cart, it doesn’t mean they have no intention of going through with the purchase.
Giving customers a little reminder of the items they left in their cart can be all that it takes for you to secure that sale. Ideally, you would want to send an email reminder to the customer after a number of days and include options such as the ability to purchase immediately or to save the cart for later.
Providing a “Save” option for customers is absolutely necessary as sometimes they might have legitimate reasons for not being able to complete a purchase at a specific time.
Offer coupons or discounts
If all else fails, there’s another way that you can use to lure potential customers back to your site, which is to offer coupons or discounts to them in your email reminder. WooCommerce comes with a Smart Coupons plugin to make it a piece of cake to manage everything.
Of course, you should probably wait until the second or third email reminder before giving the discount as some customers might take advantage of it and simply “wait you out” to get the discount.
You can even offer them discounts the moment they load your page in exchange for their email address using plugins such as
Hustle from WPMU Dev. This will give you an opportunity for email remarketing in exchange for a small discount that your customer can use at any time.
Use the coupons and discounts as a short-term tactic to increase conversion and reduce your cart abandonment problem. Plus, it will go a long way in showing your appreciation towards your customers and increasing repeat business.
Use CDN to improve the overall loading speed
The loading speed of your checkout page can affect your customer’s decision to follow through on their purchase. We’ve mentioned before how a lengthy checkout process will make a customer abandon their cart, the same can be said if it loads too slowly.
You can use Content Delivery Network (CDN) which distributes your content efficiently to your users via a network of web servers around the world. It’s basically a better content delivery system than a single server system.
But what does that mean for your website?
Less loading time for your customers as the data will be placed nearby their locations, making it easier for them to download images and load up your checkout page instantaneously.
There are a number of CDNs available for WooCommerce websites such as KeyCDN, one of the best CDNs in terms of cost and features or CloudFlare, which is free but limited in options.
If you need something bigger, Amazon Cloudfront is the best for performance and functionality but comes with a premium price. It is recommended for websites that are eCommerce focused or with lots of traffic.
The wrap-up
With every fractional decrease of your cart abandonment rate, it will translate to huge gains in your bank balance. When your customers already want to make that purchase in the first place, it’s up to you to make sure that every step of your checkout process is optimized and streamlined.
Every eCommerce store with cart abandonment issues is leaving huge, untapped resources and conversions which you can easily solve by following our tips above. When you’ve done that, you can save a lot of your marketing budget and will absolutely dominate your market along with the rewards that go with it!
Jason Chow
Jason is a fan of technology, WordPress and entrepreneurship. He is an outreach manager for WHSR and WebRevenue.io. Jason is also a marketer – he likes to read news related to startups and internet marketing.
