eCommerce Cart Optimization
The shopping cart is easy to overlook in the optimization journey, but it plays a critical role. It needs to be easy to understand, simple to navigate, and provide all the relevant information to help conclude a customer decision. Most of these are straight-forward tips pulled from LIFT principles, but just becuase they’re rational doesn’t mean they’re followed by everyone.
Carts are used to make decisions
People who make it to the cart aren’t always ready to make a purchase. They often narrow decisions, think on their choices; it’s the last step before the purchase is ready to be made.
Story Time: Working at a big box retailer, we saw customers adding 10-15 products to their carts, even when they were purchasing one or two things. They were piling in options as a short list. Wish lists and comparison tools are effective, but often customers will do their own product narrowing in a cart.
It might not seem important, but you need to show some information on the product here as well. A complete name, photo and details of their choices (size, weight, price, etc.). Even though you might not want to have links away from the cart, link products back to their product pages to help with choice. The more difficult you make it to narrow their choice, the more likely they are to abandon their cart.
Trust, Security and Ease of Proceeding
People are as weary as ever about fraud online, so you have to earn trust. Having security confirmation is good, but having reputable purchase options is best. People trust a purchase through Paypal, Apple Pay, etc. These tools add third party validation along with convenience. I find badges overrated, but displaying trust badges, SSL certificate, and customer reviews can help to increase trust for customers.
Guest Checkout: This hopefully is obvious, but the stronger the gates you put up around your checkout, the more you’ll get abandonment. I’m a strong advocate for always having a guest checkout, with an option for people to create accounts easily.
Cross-Selling and Upselling
Be smart about this. Random and unintelligent upsells can be distracting and costly, but smart upsells can be a big lift in revenue. There are great apps that use smart recommendations around programmed related items. If you have items on sale, your cart can act like a checkout line for impulse buys, so explore upselling with a program.
Extra: Abandon Carts
This may not be directly about optimizing a cart, but it’s one of the easiest programs to implement with big upsides. Many CMS tools with eCommerce capabilities offer built in abandon cart solutions or can easily integrate with a variety of email programs.
Read more about abandon cart journeys on my email triggers and automation page.
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Key Takeaways
Cart optimization is a major point of high leverage as it impacts everyone on their journey to purchase. There are simple tactics to improving cart conversion, and best of all, they’re testable!
