According to In Fifth Gear, a company dedicated to accelerating commerce, $18 billion dollars is lost every year due to shopping cart abandonment. Online consumers abandon at least one cart each year! The key, according to In Fifth Gear, is simplicity. We’ve compiled that rule and a few others into a list of the top five ways to improve your web store, and how to keep your customers from abandoning their shopping carts.
1) Sell supplemental items
Supplemental items have small profits, large margins, and keep people coming back to your store. It’s hard to get a customer to remember you, and the way to do that is to keep them coming back to you for small items that are essential to running their business.
2) Keep it simple
Your main goal in running a web store is to get customers to give you their money, so make it easy for them to do so! Give a lot of data and few options. Imagine shopping for QuickBooks products on Amazon. There are many products, several stores, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. If you keep it simple, and specialize in the few products you do sell, your customers will appreciate it. Additionally, keep a clean and easy to navigate design. In an E-Commerce blog by David Callaway, he cited a consumer study by Oneupweb, who said that 70.8% of shoppers reported that product displays on the home page had an influence on their purchases. Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to get to the payment page; otherwise they may never make it there.
3) Keep your terms obvious
Online sales are scary – fraud happens. If you keep your terms obvious and easy to see, it will be easier for you to avoid this. It’s similar to worrying about customers stealing from the front of a retail store. If you have strong terms and make your customers check mark agreements, you can fight back when people file chargebacks.
4) Appear Bigger
When Fourlane started our webstore, we only had one person operating, fulfilling, and updating the store. We processed about 3-5 orders a week, which was huge for us at the time. We made sure the people ordering felt like our only customer, but at the same time also made them feel like were among others and weren’t alone
5) “3-Second Test”
According to David Callaway, give your web store the three second test. When you look at your web store, ask yourself these two questions: “Can my shoppers tell what I’m selling within three seconds?” and “Would a shopper trust their credit card to me?” If you answer yes to both these questions, your store is ready to go.
