According to a Business Insider article, shoppers abandon their cart during login, during the checkout process, and majority leave during payment stage. This post will elaborate the reasons and present possible solutions.

Let’s simplify the three why people abandon their shopping carts.

• Account creation is mandatory.

• 37.4% of shoppers leave when they are being forced to sign up. In reality, no one wants to be forced into doing something. Remember that people visited your website to buy and not make an account.
  • Solution #1: Offer a “checkout as guest” option. If they already have an account, logging in is easy. If they don’t, let them purchase what they want as guests. After their transaction, they are more easier to convince to get an account. This time you don’t have to force them.
  • Solution #2: Encourage them to sign up. You can convince by listing the benefits of creating an account. Inform them that an account: will give you a detailed tracking of orders, allows you to access exclusive promos, and account holders get the to be notified first about discounts and coupon codes.

• Lengthy checkout procedure.

• Online shoppers are impulsive. Use this to your advantage and do not scare away shoppers by giving them long and winding forms to fill out.  Adding more fields to your checkout process will just increase cart abandonment.
  • Solution #1: Identify the information you need and only ask important details from customers. If the items are to be shipped and billed to one mailing address, do not let them repeat what they typed. Add check box that indicates that billing address is the same as shipping address.
  • Solution #2: Accept online payments and online money transfers. With services like WePay, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, Paypal, people can conveniently shop and checkout with their email and password.

• Shocking delivery costs.

• Websites want their products to appear than competing brand. But during checkout, expensive delivery costs are then revealed. Thus, shoppers just the web page and leave their cart altogether.
  • Solution #1: Offer ‘free’ delivery. Shoppers love the word FREE. When they see FREE, they will most likely to click immediately. For people outside the US, they find websites like bookdepository.com very convenient. Since the website offer free shipping wherever you are in the world, customers don’t need to think about ridiculous international shipping rates.
  • Solution #2: Estimate the cost. Let shoppers know around how much it will cost them to ship an item. One good way is to indicate price and beside it, include the minimum delivery cost.
  • Solution #3: Add a shipping calculator. Allow shoppers to enter their zip code and the calculator will display an accurate price quote to their desired zip code.

You can never stop shoppers from abandoning their cart. There are countless of reasons that are out of your control like a misplaced credit card. Still, it is not an excuse for e-commerce websites to keep making these mistakes that hinders sales conversion. With a little tweak to your website, you will avoid losing money and make your customers’ shopping experience easier.