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Do your e-commerce shoppers keep abandoning their online baskets?

It’s a surprisingly common problem for e-commerce sites: a customer acts on the temptation to visit an online retailer, places items in their digital basket and then… abandons it.

Basket abandonment costs e-retailers £18 billion a year, and research has found that it occurs more often in online than bricks-and-mortar stores. However, why does it keep happening? If your e-commerce site seems to be cursed by this issue, you could find the following to be worthy remedies.

Be more upfront about ‘hidden costs’

According to research, the most common reason for an online shopper to abandon a basket is that they spot unexpected costs such as taxes, fees and delivery charges.

Therefore, when you advertise an item’s core price, it should include any such applicable charges already. If shipping costs too often seem to deter shoppers, you could offer to axe those charges for shoppers who pay above a particular threshold, such as £50, on their order.

Implement a chatbot on your site

When a customer starts struggling during the ordering process, they might still not feel sufficiently motivated to pick up the phone to call you or load up their email program to send you an email. However, a chatbot on your website can be much more readily accessible.

If it indeed is, this could powerfully incentivise the customer to ask questions or raise concerns with the chatbot, which could even use the resulting exchanges to improve its offering for the future.

Use an exit popup to offer a free gift or discount

What is an exit popup? It’s basically a little panel that appears when the user seems to be preparing to leave the page. An exit popup can be programmed to appear when the user either clicks the ‘x’ on the tab or moves their mouse cursor out of the tab.

Our e-commerce web design experts can set up an exit popup for you, but it’s ultimately your decision exactly what text it displays. You could use this text to offer a discount, which may be ideal for converting sales otherwise at risk of being lost, or an e-book if the user agrees to provide their email address and consequently become a prospect on your emailing list.

Retarget the customer with a website cookie

No, we’re not quite suggesting that you should offer the straying customer a biscuit, although you may consider one as a free gift if you follow the previous tip. Here, we’re referring to a retargeting pixel – a piece of code that can follow the customer to advertise to them.

Here’s how it works: after a customer lands on a particular page, the pixel can be attached to the IP address of the customer and present ads to them when they are on other sites. This ad could promote a limited-time discount for a purchase of the product previously abandoned.

However, as a poorly-designed e-commerce site could keep repelling customers, you should also consider phoning our agency on 01325 582112. This way, our web design gurus will be able to investigate whether your site could benefit from tweaks or even a complete overhaul.

Do your e-commerce shoppers keep abandoning their online baskets?
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