Maximizing sales is essential for your online business. Cutting through the noise to successfully attract shoppers to your ecommerce site only to lose them just before they hit purchase can be extremely costly. It is estimated that billions of dollars worth of revenue is lost each year because potential customers get derailed during checkout.
To avoid high cart abandonment rates, the key is to remove as much friction as possible that gets in the way of conversions, like slow loading pages, lengthy forms and no security reassurances. With 46.1% of cart abandonment occurring at the payment stage, here are some of the top sources of friction to optimize so you can maximize and grow your revenue.
Never underestimate the importance of your CTA. To be effective, it needs to be enticing and stress that buyers are gaining value rather than giving it up. Copyhackers provides list of high-friction and low-friction words as the following:
| High-Friction Words | Low-Friction Words |
| Buy
Sign up Submit Invest Complete |
Get
Discover Check out (not “checkout”) Earn Reveal |
The low friction words emphasize that customers will be gaining benefits rather than giving up their time or money.
This means, most importantly, keeping your check out short. Only gather necessary information and don’t require buyers to create a profile or account if it’s not needed. Include navigation that lets customers know how many more steps they need to take to complete their purchase.
Amazon.ca has a progress indicator bar on the top of the checkout page.
Fees that dramatically raise the final price are one of the most cited reasons for abandoning a purchase during check out. All fees, whether they are taxes, shipping or handling fees, should be displayed early in the shopping process.
As an online company, your potential buyers are around the world. Accordingly, your cart needs to support multiple languages and currencies with prices automatically adjusting to display in a user’s local currency.
Carts that don’t offer customers’ preferred payment options are much more likely to experience higher abandonment rates. This means you need to offer more than just credit cards, especially when selling in different parts of the world. Even in countries where credit cards are still dominant, many shoppers are increasingly opting for alternatives, especially mobile users. According to Rob Harper, Head of Retail Services at PayPal, it takes an average of 140 taps for users to pay through a smartphone. PayPal reduces the number of taps to 19.
Overall, ensure your checkout is as optimized as possible. This means not only keeping your forms short, but also reinforcing their decision to make their purchase instead of giving them any reason to hesitate. This will help maximize your conversions and optimize your online revenue.
