Hola! Those damn abandoned shopping carts. What’s a retailer to do? Well, in a couple previous posts we put up some ideas on how to get ’em to come back and buy after they left: sending an abandoned cart email campaign and using ad remarketing to convince them to pull out that wallet and lay down some cold hard cash.

Well, let’s get proactive today and talk about ways to stop people from fleeing your cart in the first place, and how to reduce shopping cart abandonment right off the bat, shall we?

Here’s a great study from Statista outlining the main reasons shoppers do not complete a purchase:

So let’s drill in to how you can reduce shopping cart abandonment! We have personally experienced gains from the following:

1) State your shipping costs upfront! Ask for the zip code in the cart pre-check out and serve up your shipping options (i.e. slow boat, 3-4 day, overnight) with associated costs. It’s amazing how many sites still don’t offer this. That said, not to overcomplicate things, but consider an upgrade to free shipping in the cart if they reach a certain cart value.

2) Use the Express Lane mentality! We are inpatient breed, aren’t we? Too many steps, too many clicks and you are dead. Well, not you, but your sales numbers. And your bonus. And your dreams of that big promotion next quarter. If you do choose a multi-step checkout, make the steps and progress clear. wine.com does a nice job of executing on a multi-step cart:

3) MBG – The trusty ‘ol Money Back Guarantee, or even better Low Price Guarantee. Look up (at the chart), 36% of folks didn’t complete their purchase because they found a better deal somewhere else. So match it, at least for certain products. And show them how easy – and free! – it is to return their product and get a refund.

Now first and foremost, always test then measure (after all we ARE a business dashboards company.) Do not do a radical change without testing. Promise us that, OK? What works for some retailers and sites may not work for others!