How Easy to Use is your Online Shopping Cart?

For an eCommerce website to flourish, each website owner must have an online shopping cart that is easy to utilize. On top of that, having a great cart efficiency, usability and design, along with an effective shopping cart checkout process, are crucial steps in setting up a shopping cart system that can improve your online conversion rates. This is especially important for website owners that offer a variety of products. Not only will it make it easier for your customers to purchase, it also increases the chances of your customers buying more items.

In a recent podcast, Bobby Hewitt of Creative Thirst imparts the many ways to make your online shopping carts easy to use. As previously mentioned, shopping are are considered to be one of the most important elements of an online business. Unlike previous years wherein users had to be oriented on how to use them, now most users are familiar with an online shopping cart, and they will expect to have one in each shopping website they visit. To learn more about conversion rate optimization, visit us at Convert.

Why Shopping Carts Are Important For eCommerce Websites

The business of eCommerce demonstrates a rapid growth in the online market industry worldwide. With billions of companies and websites that are eagerly working to magnetize traffic and sales, shopping facilities such as shopping carts has become a necessity for several online businesses. The larger your inventory, the more you will need a shopping cart system installed in your website. Here are some of the reasons why shopping cart is a must;

• It’s the easiest and convenient way to process payments
• It improves the site usability
• It organize successful transactions
• Better functionality and features

E-Commerce Shopping Carts Do’s And Don’ts

Despite the increasing number of e-commerce users, there is a higher percentage of shopping carts transactions that are being discarded. Having a shopping cart system is not enough. You have to realize that most users want it to be easy to shop and buy your items. Your system has to be user friendly and efficient. The Forrester report says,

Despite improvements in site design and increased consumer comfort with online purchasing, 88% of Web buyers say that they have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing a transaction.

How do you avoid abandonment? Taking the officedepot.com as an example. Office Depot in particular offers their customers two options. First, you can log in as a returning customer that already has an account and continue to check out. Then for new customers, there’s a new customer option—it’s just a simple button that just gets you to checkout. It doesn’t ask for any log in name or any password, or any information upfront. So many online shopping carts place a major barriers right in front of you at the very first step or checkout. But office depot removes this roadblocks right from the moment of checkout.

So what can e-commerce owners DO and what should they NOT DO when setting up e-commerce shopping carts? Here is a list:

• Offer a continue checkout option without forcing your potential customer to fill out account information at the very beginning of the online buying process.
• Avoid the hurdles and commitments, just simply buy.
• When a website requires its buyers to join, or create an account – even if it is as simple as creating a log in name and password-, it psychologically puts a lot of pressure on the prospective buyer and creates friction in the buying process.
• Make it easy for a potential customer to buy from you.
• Understand what is happening in the mind of customer.
• Don’t force a user to go through just in order to buy, just in order to get the money from a potential prospect. This creates a lot of friction and anxiety in the mind of the consumer.
• After accomplishing a sale, the customer is at the most co-operative point. State the benefits of creating an account at the right time in the process which doesn’t act as a barrier since the visitor intended to buy is satisfied.
• Satisfy the customer first. Then satisfy the needs of the marketing department.
• Put incentive in every sale to receive future special offers. This way, you can start building a valuable lasting online relationship.

[Tweet “About 75% of people who were forced to register first never tried to purchase.”]

In addition, A/B testing for eCommerce shopping carts is highly recommended to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate by running a user test to determine why users are leaving and which carts generate the highest conversion rate. When you are able to determine at which point your customers abandon their carts, you can then make the necessary adjustments.

Keep It User Friendly

An easy to use shopping cart system can cut down the lost sales. Simplify your customer experience, don’t complicate the process and most importantly, build a valuable lasting online relationship with your customers. This way, there’s no way you can’t improve higher online conversion rates. For more information about A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, you can visit us at Convert.