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Dec '09
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Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest issues for small businesses online. And some small business owners have a fear of abandonment – shopping cart abandonment, that is.
Of course, you can’t chase your customer down to remind them to purchase the items in their shopping cart, or try to persuade them to. You can’t fine them or sue them. You can work to improve your business model to try and decrease shopping cart abandonment. But how?
It helps to know what causes shopping cart abandonment to begin with. It’s a matter of trust. People bail because they aren’t 100% convinced that your service is going to satisfy their needs. They may be sold on the product, but are they sold on you? Are they sold on your company? Do they really believe you’ll deliver the product?
In order to ensure that customers don’t pull a head fake on the buying process and leave your site with items still in their shopping cart, you need to assure them every step of the way that they can trust you. If you want to see what I mean, make a purchase from Amazon.com and see how many times they assure you that your privacy is a high concern of theirs and that they will ship your product inexpensively and on time. See how many times they ask you to trust them. That’s what builds trust. Constant communication and putting your customer at ease.
December 17th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Hi Caroline
I agree totally that trust is one of the most important reasons for cart abandonment. However, your comment that
‘you can’t chase your customer down to remind them to purchase the items in their shopping cart, or try to persuade them to‘
..isn’t strictly correct. Following up on abandoned shopping carts with emails reminders is a very effective technique in recovering abandoned shopping carts
If you look at shopping cart recovery programs using this technique, you find that up to 50% of the abandoned carts can be recovered with an optimized program. Marketing Experiuments referred to these programs as "one of the simplest and most cost-effective marketing techniques that we have tested.”
There’s a free tool you can use here which will track abandoners on your website, and enable you to follow up easily. There's aslo a host of infoirmation, data and best practices on shopping cart abandonment on my blog here:here