8 Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment This Holiday Season
Cart abandonment stats are a hard pill to swallow. People have made the effort to visit your website and have added wine to the shopping cart - but are jumping ship just before they give you their credit card. Across the Vin65 platform, abandon cart rates get higher over the holidays because people are browsing.
Vin65 has a great cart abandonment action email to remind those browsers that they've left items in their cart. It even re-populates their cart for easy purchase completion. Unfortunately, a small percentage of wineries have that email turned on.
The holidays bring a lot of window shoppers. Here are some tips to shrink those abandoned cart numbers down and to start converting more this holiday season:
1. State your shipping upfront
High shipping rates are the #1 deterrent from buying wine online. State your shipping costs upfront, preferably on the wine page, along with where you ship to. This decreases cart abandonment because people are able to weigh the cost-benefit for shipping wine, rather than going through most of the check-out process and, ultimately, leaving.
2. Make forms simple
Across Vin65, over 30% of website visitors are on a mobile phone. Filling out forms on a mobile phone is a cumbersome experience - and it's made much worse when you ask a lot of irrelevant questions. Cut down on form fields to get the order - after that you can start your profiling for better marketing and re-orders.
3. Show the cart summary
Remind consumers what they've added to their cart. Give them the opportunity to estimate their shipping costs and taxes so they know exactly what their card will be charged. You'll want to make the button for 'checkout' the biggest and brightest, with the 'continue shopping' prompt visible, but more understated than checkout.
4. Don't force registration
Forcing people to register prior to buying your wine is making them jump through hoops. Let them checkout as a guest and make the online experience as easy as the cellar door experience. If someone walks in to your cellar door to pick up a couple of bottles - do you make them fill out a bunch of paperwork and create a username and password? Of course not! Don't make them do it online either!
5. Reassure security
We've seen our share of shady websites. We've heard the horror stories of security hacks and credit card exposures from modern retailers like Kmart. You need to show your SSL compliant security in your URL and ease consumer doubts on the checkout page and show them that your site is secure and that security is a top-priority.
6. Encapsulate the checkout process
You've got the wine lover right where you want them - about to give you their credit card. Make sure the checkout page has the navigation removed and that there aren't any distractions. The checkout process shouldn't have recommended wines or a newsletter subscribe. The goal of the checkout page is to get them to buy your wine. Look at how Amazon does it – there is no menu in the checkout area.
7. One page checkout
The checkout process needs to be clean and simple with only one page to submit. Get all the payment details on this page as well - with one submit button. This is a faster, easier experience for the customer. Less steps during the checkout process gives the customer less reasons to abandon their shopping cart.
8. Get it faster
Your site needs to be fast - people aren't going to wait for the page to load. When adding wine to their cart they'll want to see it add-to-cart instantaneously. If your website is slow, customers will get impatient and may leave if it lags. You can chat with your designer to speed test your site and reduce lags by decreasing image sizes, etc.
Final thoughts
Technically, once an order has been submitted, the cart abandonment is no longer applicable, however, after sales marketing matters. Show your customer you care about them getting their order quickly. An order confirmation should be sent within a couple of minutes, you should provide a tracking number by the end of day and give them an estimated date for delivery. Since wine delivery requires a signature, it's important to keep the lines of communication open. This ensures that first time customers continue to buy - eventually becoming a repeat customer, and ultimately, a club member.
#SellMoreWine this holiday season - and turn on your cart abandonment action emails to help you do just that.