Going beyond shopping cart abandonment in E-Commerce

A trend commonly observed in online shopping than in brick and mortar retail outlets represents a large gap in potential conversions. It is estimated that the percentage of cart abandonments ranges from 50% to 80%. Furthermore, according to a ReadyCloud report, there’s a 97.9% gap in conversions with a 65% rate of cart abandonments and the rates are already on the rise. The phenomenon of customers changing their minds and deciding not to purchase in the middle of an e-commerce transaction has, according to a Forrester research report, caused annual losses of more than 18 trillion USD to enterprises globally.

Common reasons for cart abandonment

While the occurrences of cart abandonments are rampant, organizations need to understand the reasons behind this setback so as to devise strategies for its reduction. According to the Baymard Institute, the most common reasons why customers abandon carts are:

a) Higher shipping charges
b) Lengthy or complicated check-out processes
c) Creation of customer’s account in the e-commerce site
d) Lack of trust in payment gateways
e) Errors/ glitches/ crashes in websites
f) Lack of enough payment options
g) Slow functioning of the website and so on.

Meeting customer expectations is the biggest opportunity

Organizations can focus on the above reasons to come up with innovative solutions to deal with the issue. As soon as they notice a customer moving away from making payments for selected products/ services, their customer service agents can email/ call/ chat with the customer to understand the particular reason(s) behind the decision. It is quite possible that customers encounter problems while shopping online and expect quick support to make decisions to buy. According to a HubSpot Research survey, 90% customers expect “immediate” support/ responses and 72% mean “immediate” by “within 30 minutes.” Organizations can consider such customer expectations as opportunities and approach them “immediately” to influence their buying behavior. Once they get hold of their challenges while shopping online, they can provide holistic customer support services through the following three ways:

1. Make customers aware of product availability and categorization

A personalized and unique customer experience in an online store is ensured by enabling customers locate and find what they are looking at, quickly and easily. Product categorization and filtering provide customers with options to mix and match products/ services so that there’s no hindrance in finding and selecting items in the first place. Support services must be prompt enough in guiding them, in case customers detect challenges in locating products/ services.

2. Simplifying checkout process

Checkout process is the last and most crucial process to ensure a successful conversion. In order to render a hassle-free checkout option, businesses need to keep it short and simple and provide guest checkout as well as multiple payment options to customers so that they don’t change their minds. On detecting any issue related with online payment services, organizations, through their multi-channel support system should take a step further in letting customers pay cash on delivery in order to not lose them out in the last minute.

3. Offering discounts, cashbacks and coupon codes wisely

Discounts, cashbacks and coupons often tempt abandoners to re-evaluate their purchasing decisions. While it may seem a great strategy for organizations to reduce cart abandonments, heavy discounts and offers ultimately lead to low profit margins. Therefore, it becomes critical for businesses to evaluate offers which they need to provide to attract abandoners and motivate other customers. They can become creative with discounts in unlimited ways and still strike a balance between attracting more and more customers and maintaining profits. Their support services must remain super active in alerting abandoners with offers, right at the moment they detect changes in their purchasing behavior.

In Summary

Although e-commerce is growing at a spectacular rate, even during the COVID-19 crisis, yet it isn’t able to reach its peak because of the simple fact that more than half of its carts get abandoned on an average. The best remedy for this elephant in room is to perform a root- cause analysis of every such encounter and arrive at the most effective personalized customer experience strategy for achieving extraordinary successful conversion rates.

JindalX Advantage

We have extensive experience in taking care of our clients’ requirements through our:

Omni-channel Support – Chat | Email | Voice | Social Media

• Absolute accuracy & optimum CX with up to 4 concurrent chats
• Fastest response time and 24×7 support
• Propensity engines for intelligent solutions and 90% First-Contact-Resolution (FCR)
• Proactive social media interactions and end-to-end resolution to grievances

We give what your business needs:

• Personalized and human-centric customer services
• Gamification based process training led by technology
• Customer Engagement for propensity-based x-selling
• Instant support for abandoned carts via multiple touchpoints
• BI led ‘JX Techpack’ to give real-time 360º view of operations

To get a free demo of our real time 360˚ view dashboard & to know more, book an appointment or mail us at sales@jindalx.com.