Abandoned cart system
An abandoned cart recovery system is a feature that helps shop owners to recover lost sales by engaging with the customers who abandoned their carts and encouraging them to complete the purchase.
Here is how it generally works:
> When a user adds items to their cart and enters their contact details (such as email address), the system captures this information.
> After a specific time interval the system automatically sends follow-up emails to the customers who abandoned their carts. These emails usually remind the customers about the items left behind and provide a dedicated discount to encourage the purchase.
> The system tracks the effectiveness of the abandoned cart recovery process, monitoring metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
According to industry studies and reports, the average cart abandonment rate across industries typically falls between 60% and 80%. This means that, on average, 60% to 80% of customers who add items to their carts do not complete the purchase.
The average abandoned cart conversion rate typically ranges from 10% to 30%. This means that, on average, between 10% and 30% of abandoned carts are recovered and converted into completed purchases through effective recovery efforts.
Let’s make a quick calculation:
Let’s imagine you generate USD 100,000/month sales on your shop.
USD 100,000 is only 30% of the amount of the cart generated on your shop during the month.
That means that the mount of abandoned cart is approximately USD 230,000.
If we apply the conversion rate of abandoned cart emails the amount that could be retrieved is USD 46,000.
With this example, you can see that by implementing an efficient abandoned cart policy on your shop you could potentially boost your sales by up to 50%.
Streamlined Checkout
The goal here is to make the checkout process as easy and straightforward as possible to help seal the deal.
There are a few tricks that can assist in simplifying the customer’s checkout experience:
Break down the checkout into clear steps, all on a single page: The typical checkout process steps are as follow: Personal details, delivery details & options, payment options. It’s important to ensure that each field is accurately completed before progressing to the next step. Ultimately, the page transition between steps should be seamless without requiring a page reload.
Give a quick summary of what’s in the shopping cart: Customers who are checking out should be able to see their cart summary at all time during the checkout process without having to click to view the details.
Allow customers to check out as guests if they prefer: Opting for guest checkout enables customers to bypass the "personal details" step expediting the checkout process compared to requiring registration initially. Ideally, as a shop owner you want your clients to create an account so that you can create a relation with them and eventually send promotional offers. To achieve that, we suggest offering a free delivery or a discount for customers who complete a registration during the checkout.
Let registered customers save their addresses for convenience: Sticking to the goal of making the checkout process smoother, it’s beneficial to enable customers to store multiple preferred addresses within their account. This way, when customers are logged in and proceed to checkout, they should have the option to directly choose their desired delivery address in the delivery step of the checkout process.
Show shipping costs and options right from the start: Half of the visitors who initiate the checkout process but do not complete it refrain from doing so due to excessively high additional costs. Extra costs include shipping, taxes, and fees. Therefore it is crucial to show all the additional costs as early as possible in the process. Ideally, showing the associated costs at the cart level is the most efficient option.
Provide the option to sign in using social media accounts: Social logins have been on the rise in popularity for the past few years. While traditional methods of logging in still hold the top spot, social sign-ins have been steadily gaining momentum and are projected to become even more widespread, particularly among the younger demographic. This trend is driven by the convenience it offers, as users are spared the need to manually input and remember passwords.
Convenience store pickup & Line pay
Payment and shipping options on an e-commerce website are crucial to conversion rate.
The most important thing when it comes to that is to think and plan locally.
Payment
Over the years, alternative payment methods (APMs) have surged in popularity. Currently, APMs stand as the primary payment choice globally, exerting significant influence, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. However, it remains crucial to retain the credit card payment option on a website.
The unique characteristic of these electronic wallets lies in the fact that not all countries are using the same. While options like Google Pay and Apple Pay hold global appeal, their prominence may not extend to certain regions, as is the case with Taiwan where Line Pay takes precedence.
In the context of Taiwan, PayPal can’t be used for the domestic market.
Given these considerations, I recommend offering at least the three most widely used online payment methods that are specific to the target country.
Shipping
Shipping is even more country specific than payment is. We all know global shipping companies such as UPS and Fedex but those are barely the cheapest options when you send your goods in your own country (except if you live in the US).
When it comes to shipping, you’ll have to choose which providers you want to work with and which shipping options you want to offer.
Ideally, you should have one provider than can provide all the shipping options you need. Connecting your shop to the provider’s API can be a lengthy process so better avoid having too many providers.
Wrap-up
In conclusion, this article series titled "Boost Online Sales" explores key strategies to increase inbound traffic and improve e-commerce performance.
The third article emphasizes three powerful and advanced e-commerce features to increase conversions by setting-up an abandoned cart system, streamlining the checkout process, and working on the payment & shipping options.
Incorporating these advanced e-commerce features will likely increase the percentage of customers who complete their purchase after adding items to their cart.