Shopping cart abandonment is one of those topics that I could really go on and on about.

Instead of giving you the usual, though, I’d like to give you some tips with unconventional twists to help you minimize it

After all, shopping cart abandonment is one of those things that has to be aggressively fought every day that you’re in business. Making a few unique choices about how your shopping cart presents notices may help to increase your conversions.

Onward…

• Inform prospects of limited stock…even if they already know it

Informing your prospects of their items’ stock positions is a smart move. Doing this serves as a real-time reminder that you could theoretically sell out of a desired item.

But giving prospects stock positions can be a beneficial tactic even if your business deals with one-of-a-kind items.

An example?

I visit a certain website that’s dedicated to selling vintage and handmade goods. The premise of the website rests on the idea that each item is unique. Yet, I noticed that every time I add an item to my shopping cart, a message automatically populates informing me that there is “only 1 in stock!”

In instances like these, the tactic of informing prospects of stock positions isn’t so much to literally inform them of their scarcity- that’s obvious. Instead, it’s used to increase the value of the product in the prospect’s mind and inspire an immediate checkout so that other prospects don’t snatch up the product before they do. It means that prospects get competitive and business gets paid sooner.

• Use visual cues

Prospects respond to easily understandable checkout processes. You should know that a checkout page is not where you need to include blocks of text. But you should also recognize that even knocking out a few unnecessary phrases can help facilitate the buying process.

Think about using short and sweet messages when you have to use words and images in place of droppable phrases to further simplify the process. Remember that many online purchases are impulse buys. You need to stay in line with your prospects’ thought processes. Don’t give them a reason to second-guess purchasing from you. Having to read mountains of text before being able to purchase makes prospects think that there’s a bunch of fine print to be understood- fine print that includes catches. The last thing you want prospects to think is that purchasing from you is more trouble than it’s worth.

• Offer status updates

Prospects abandon shopping carts for any number of reasons. But one reason that doesn’t rank high with business owners is simple forgetfulness. Why not?  Prospects are human, too. On any given day, they’re likely to have a bunch of different thoughts racing through their minds. Couple that with the fact that attention spans are slim on the Internet, and it’s very possible for a prospect to add something to their cart in earnest, only to get distracted and leave it there.

Some business owners try to combat this by simply putting the number of items in an abandoned cart near the shopping cart’s link on the home page. The number hovers, supposedly “reminding” prospects that they have something in there, waiting to be bought.

That tactic is problematic for me. Why? Well, for a lot of reasons. But mainly because…what if there is only one item in the shopping cart? The shopping cart’s link would look something like this:

“Shopping Cart (1)”

How is that supposed to nudge a prospect to check out? The prospect will simply say to himself, “Why, yes, I have one shopping cart. Thank you very much.” And he’ll continue doing whatever he’s doing.

In that situation, the best you can do is hope that he finds another product that he wants, adds it to his shopping cart and discovers that his initial product is still there, too. And that’s assuming that you haven’t emptied his shopping cart after a session or that that he hasn’t already bought the item from a competitor. Here, numbers run the risk of being completely ambiguous. And that’s the opposite of what they should be for any business owner.

I much prefer to see shopping cart links announce the number of abandoned items and the word “item” (or something similar) next to it. There’s nothing vague about that. Combine that with an extra factor that gets prospects moving like a change in color of the shopping cart link or some (optimized) wordings that tell them to hurry and make the purchase and you may have a recipe for increased, faster sales.

Of course, implementing required registration so that a specific account can be created for each customer can mean that you can get much more detailed. If you do that, you may be able to set aside a little part of their account for shopping cart reminders, payment and shipping histories. Sometimes, a big, fat “UNPAID” sticker is all that a prospect has to see to get them back on the purchasing track.

Are any of you employing any unique shopping cart abandonment tricks? What are they?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

I think it’s time for a little discussion about using images in shopping carts.

This is just because I don’t see anybody else talking about the importance of images in them.

The topic seems to be ignored. Whenever I see marketing professionals write about these things, it’s usually just in side note form.

But, no more!

The following is just a little list of how you can use images in shopping carts for better conversions.

• Progress bars

Now I know what you’re thinking: this isn’t a fundraiser or a political campaign. But status bars are a lot more helpful to the process of completing checkout than you might initially think. Unfortunately, somewhere along the lifespan of ecommerce, enough businesses have made their checkout processes so laborious that prospects expect yours to be the same way.

I don’t have to tell you that you should streamline your checkout process so that it’s easy and fast for your prospects to complete. What I do want to suggest is that you implement a status bar that will inform your prospects of how far along they are towards completion. There’s something reassuring about a status bar telling a prospect that it’ll soon be over and that only a few more screens remain before they’ll be free and the owner of your product. In many ways, a progress bar acts in the same way that a road sign does. Road signs give drivers a sense of where they are in relation to their surroundings and keep their anxiety in check. The bars do the same for prospects.

Bryan Eisenberg suggests numbering checkout steps, giving prospects brief descriptions of what’s involved with the steps and allowing prospects to easily switch between steps for review and modification.

• Borders

Generally, borders are important on any website because they help visitors differentiate one area of a web page from another. But they can also help by minimizing distraction. When you use borders around a checkout process, your prospects are subliminally told to keep their eyes trained on what’s been enclosed. It’s true that you can easily code HTML to reflect your desire for basic borders. However, you can also use eye-catching, specially-designed graphic borders.

• Products

Shopping carts mean business. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be restricted to text and fine print. Prospects respond better to shopping carts that have thumbnail images of products in them. Why? Probably because they remind them of the product they’re about to purchase. Justin Palmer also correctly points out that prospects don’t have as much intimate knowledge about your products as you do, so remembering a product by name can be difficult, whereas identifying one on sight can be easy. So don’t be shy- include product images in your shopping cart. This includes products that you want to cross-sell and up-sell.

• Security

Just for good measure, consider showing prospects your various security and third-party verification seals on your shopping cart. After all, if there’s one place where prospects need to be reassured that their financial information is safe, it’s in the place where they enter their credit card details.

• Payment

I can’t tell you how often I run across online businesses that don’t have payment icons in their shopping carts. Instead, I find the infamous drop-down menu. That’s bad. But it’s even worse when the drop down-menu’s default selection is one method of payment so that it appears that it’s the only type that the business accepts. Your business just doesn’t benefit from payment options that are visually represented- it needs it. Visual representation tells prospects straightaway what payment options are available to them, so they don’t have to hunt around for the answer, or worse, think that you don’t accept their preferred method.

Luckily, a variety of credit card icons are readily available to you- some even on credit card company or third-party payment processor websites. Many are free, while others require that you have a merchant account. Best of all, you can find payment visual representation that compliments the design of your website (ever hear of 3-D credit card icons? Well, now you have).

• Your logo

Ah, and now we’ve come to the biggie- your business logo. It’s a shame, but I still know of some online businesses that don’t dress their shopping carts with their own business logos. I just really want to shake them and ask them “Why?!” even though there’s no real reason why it should happen.

Leaving your logo out of your shopping cart can mean bad news for your conversions. If your prospects don’t see your logo, they may think that they’re on the wrong website (entirely possible when considering comparison shopping and browser tabs), that you’ve redirected them somewhere else or even that you have something to hide. Believe me, prospects will be asking “Why?!”, too. They took a leap of faith and decided to trust you and patronize your business- the least you can do is show your face! So have your shopping cart proudly wear your logo.

How do you implement images in your shopping carts?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

I would love to be able to share the actual client data but they would like to remain anonymous. Ayat is leading a full website conversion optimization project for an apparel company. We focused on the checkout process during the first phase of the project. Our goal was to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. We asked the client do 3 things:

1. Add an “assurance center” to the right navigation of the cart page. The goal is to reduce any FUDDs, customers may have (note: image of Land’s End assurance certain is an example. They are not our client) 

2. Remove a reset (erase) button on the cart page (who invented reset buttons anyways?)

3. Add security seals next to the call to action button.

The client came back and said, “That is it?”

Yep, that is all for this round.

The results? A whopping 30% decrease in shopping cart abandonment rate. Pretty nice, don’t you think?

© 2006-20010 Invesp