An ugly truth: most buyers abandon their online shopping carts before completing the purchasing process. They were interested in your product, ready to buy it but finally navigated away from your website.

So you are losing money no matter how awesome your site looks or how much traffic you have drawn. They seem to be meaningless when it comes to making your potential customers actually open their wallets and pay.

Apparently not only you got headache by this trouble. A recent study by Baymard Institute concluded that, 68.07% of online shopping carts were abandoned on average.

Did it really impact your bottom line?

Let’s do some calculations.

Hypothetically you have:

• 1000 checkout visits every month
• 200$ estimated value per potential order
• 68.07% of shopping carts were abandoned on average

We’ll use this formula:
Monthly Money Loss = Monthly Checkout Visits x Value per Order x Abandonment Rate

In this example, you will lose $136,140 per month or $1,633,680 per year.
Now apply the formula to your real business statistics. You might need to take a deep breath and later wonder why your customers gave up their online cart. Here is your answer brought by Statista.
Though the data was collected 3 years ago, its applicability still remains unchanged. Based on this report, I would suggest these 5 steps to reduce online abandonment rate and help boost your sales.

1. Display security elements thoroughly.

You might already have a security logo on your final checkout page but still it isn’t enough to convince your visitors that your site is safe to use. Begenerous with trust badges to show the potential customers how trustworthy you are. This will encourage their confidence at paying online when knowing that their payment information is absolutely secure.

According to a poll conducted by Get Elastic. After placing a security logo on their site, half of their customers saw the signal and consequently the sales increased slightly by 4-6%.

In case that you can’t afford one of those popular used badges, a personally made version may provide the same lift of conversion rate like the well-known one does.

2. Offer appropriate support through live chat

When I mention support, I mean 24/7 efficient customer support from you. It is of no use installing a live chat tool if you are not online when your visitors need information for their queries. Some live chat software, for example Subiz, provide mobile platform so that you can still chat with your customers with stability even when you are away from keyboard.

The frequency of your live chat window pop up on your site is important too. Because it may turn out to be annoying for web surfers who have to deal with your unnecessary support all the time. Also, it can distract them from reading your marketing content which is available to persuade them to buy your product.

Check this post to understand how to improve your online customer service with live chat.

3. Show your testimonials and customer reviews.

This step is essential for small or unknown business to build up your credibility and reputation in customers’ mind. By doing this, you will assure your audiences that your products are good quality and favorably used by many other customers.

For placing testimonials, remember to include all of the basic information about that person or company like full name, age and location. If you want to use logos of the companies that are using your service or product, the logos should be clear and authentic. Most importantly, don’t ever think about faking a testimonial unless you want your business credibility destroyedin one day.

With regard to a survey of Dimensional Research in 2013, 88% customers confessed that their purchasing decisions were influenced by online customer reviews. Another experiment on Amazon also revealed that the rating of review didn’t affect buyers as much as its actual content and linguistic style matching did.

One of the reasons is because the evaluation of 1 to 5 stars is defined differently by varied consumers.Plus, the more common jargon and slang people use, the more convincing their comments are.

4. Do not ask for registration or log in

I am sure one of those reading this article has stopped an online shopping due to this unreasonable requirement. Again, if you are not a big brand, you should bear in your mind that you don’t have the privilege to ask your visitors to create an account while shopping.Customers really don’t like it.

As one e-commerce consumer once said “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something”. To them, creating an account means involving a long term complex relationship that is difficult to break up.

There is an interesting story spreading out in digital marketing world about the $300,000,000 button. A famous anonymous e-commerce company, supposedly BestBuy, which had 45% increase in sales equally to 300 million dollars by replacing register button with continue button. Instead of forcing people to sign up, the company made registration as an optional choice. And the impact was drastically huge.

So the less you ask your customers, the more money they are likely to spend.

5. Provide an easy-peasy checkout process

Undoubtedly a complicated online checkout page can have a big impact on your sales as it turns your potential customers away from you. Hence, a simple, apparent and mobile friendly check out procedure is your critical hit point in the whole game between you and your visitors.
Before the step that customer clicks Pay/Purchase, make sure you have:

• Clear thumbnails of items that are being bought.
• Easily edited online shopping cart.
• Various payment methods to choose from and PayPal is a must have.
• Guarantee and refund conditions are described clearly.
• No hidden cost at all.

In a nutshell

The online cart abandonment is a pain for all of e-marketers as their efforts can’t result in any purchase. This guide describes your potential buyers’ main reasons to leave your site without paying anything and provides solutions for that.

It will work differently for different business with more or less efficiency but be absolutely worth applying. You can save so much loss and increase conversion rate significantly by reducing your abandonment rate. So stop leaving money on the table with these five easy steps.