eCommerce Basket Abandonment and User Experience

ecommerce ux

Ecommerce Managers everywhere worry about basket abandonment rate. In fact we have just completed a report for one of our retail clients all about basket abandonment and how user experience can have a positive impact. But the first thing we had to do was to illustrate what good looks like as it is difficult to know whether the performance you are experiencing in your online store is good, bad or indifferent.

The most common metric used for measuring shopping basket abandonment is ‘cart abandonment rate’. This is calculated by taking the total number of people who click to place items in the shopping basket and dividing it by the total number that actually start (not complete) the checkout process. And according to the Baymard Institute the average industry-wide cart abandonment rate is 67.9%.

Here are three things you can do about it:

Surprises

If you really want to enhance the user experience and reduce abandonment rates then avoid giving your customers unwelcome surprises, particularly late in the purchase process. Hiding delivery charges and then suddenly revealing them as a customer is about to pay is like slapping them in the face with a wet fish. You wouldn’t do it in store so don’t do it online. Tell them earlier, they may still choose to abandon the sale but as least you won’t have disenfranchised them as well.

Marketing Info

Of course you want to capture every last piece of marketing information from your customers but the first time they enter the purchase process is not the place to do it. Imagine if you can a large security guard stood at the checkout of your favourite grocers and making you complete a form with your date of birth, home telephone number, email, age, gender etc. before allowing you to pay for your tooth paste. You would leave that store and never go back.

Why is it different online? It isn’t so don’t do it. Earn your customers trust, give them good reasons to share their personal information with you, offer a quid-pro-quo and you might even find engagement goes up not down.

Forcing Registration

We have already written an item on guest checkout nightmares and it is worth re-iterating here. If you offer a guest checkout route and your new customers decide to use it, you can be almost certain that they think it will be a better, simpler user experience than the non-guest route. Try not to shatter this illusion by making guest checkout either nearly as complex or more complex than the registered user route.

To learn more about how to reduce basket abandonment in your eCommerce website get in contact now.

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[…] showing basket abandonment rates to average a massive 69%, you need to be making every effort to ensure checkout usability. Providing the consumer’s preferred method of payment, whatever their country, is just one […]

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