Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment with Checkout Manager
(Part Two)

In the previous post we looked at some ways to reduce cart abandonment. Here are some more tips to keep buyers moving through your checkout process with special emphasis on many of the features of Checkout Manager that address cart abandonment reasons.

• Problem: Buyers may not purchase for fear of a better deal being found.
  Solutions:
  • If your store offers a low-price guarantee (or a price match guarantee) state this in your checkout process. Some users may be comparison shopping and knowing that you will match or beat any advertised price may convince them to shop with your store over another.
  • Offer short-term or seasonal specials such as free shipping to encourage purchases. Offer coupons or discounts to lure shoppers into buying an item.
• Problem: Buyers may get lost if you don’t limit options and provide a clear path.
  Solutions:
  • Provide a consistent indicator of the buyer’s progress in the checkout process. Checkout Manager allows you to create customized progress indicators, even uploading images. Custom graphics can show the buyer where they are in the process, and how many steps are left.
  • Ensure buyers know how to get to the next step by using prominent buttons in checkout. With Checkout Manager, merchants can use custom CSS buttons in a contrasting color of their choice so the checkout, continue and place order buttons stand out. Merchants can even upload custom buttons.
  • Use page views and click trails to study how buyers interact with your site. Are visitors browsing but not buying? This may indicate you do not have enough information on product pages to make a purchase decision. Are visitors getting to the shopping cart but abandoning orders? This may indicate they lack critical information to convince them to complete the order. Better still, each time a customer calls, try and listen for problems they may have had in your cart. If they say that they started to purchase but didn’t for some reason or another, try and address that concern.

Figure 1: Two-page order process. Note that the Order Review page can also be hidden to create a one-page checkout.

• Problem: Buyers may abandon orders that take too long to complete.
  Solutions:
  • Reduce the number of pages in your checkout process. With Checkout Manager you can choose to combine shipping and billing on one page, hide the Order Review page, or even have a one-page checkout process. Merchant can quickly reconfigure and test new checkout flows to see which flow results in a higher number of completed orders.
  • Consider carefully adding any additional fields in checkout that may prolong checkout unnecessarily.

Remember: Don’t abandon design when it comes to your checkout pages—design to reduce abandonment.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business