4 Steps to lower your shopping cart abandonment rate

The shoppers are on your site, they are interested in the product, but the design of your shopping cart is causing you to lose many if not most of your customers. Sound familiar? It should. Recent research indicates that the average e-commerce site is losing near 75 percent of its shoppers during shopping cart phase of a transaction. While that statistic is probably influenced upward by a few terrible websites, the fact remains that most sites are losing huge numbers of customers by not focusing on their shopping cart. Fortunately, by taking a few relatively minor steps, you can vastly decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate. Fewer Steps are Better This mantra is as old as e-commerce itself. By forcing your customers to go through multiple pages you will assuredly see some attrition. You should ask yourself, is all the information I am collecting absolutely necessary? Is there another configuration that would reduce the number of steps my customers will face? Surprisingly, however, this is probably the last step that you should take. Unless your process is particularly laborious, empirical studies indicate that this will likely affect your attrition minimally for the cost and effort required. So, I am not saying not to reduce your checkout steps, but only that you should prioritize the other steps above this one. Progress Indicators In both e-commerce and brick and mortars, the single biggest inhibitor to conversions is uncertainty. This is certainly easy to imagine when you consider some brick and mortar examples. BestBuy stores have transitioned to a single line for all of their cashiers rather than having customers pick a cashier to line up in front of. Why? The answer is simple, uncertainty hurts conversion rates. Humans have an instinctual desire to know what is coming ahead. By including a progress indicator at each and every step of the checkout process you will see some remarkable increases in customer retention. Even if you have a 10 step checkout process, letting customers know where they are along the process will ensure a much greater number of completions. Pictures, Pictures, Pictures Shoppers respond to sensory stimulation. People like to take things off the shelf and inspect them. Because that option isn’t available for e-commerce sites, you need to compensate for this deficiency as best as possible. One way to ensure better conversions is to include pictures not only in the store but also in the cart. Shoppers, especially those new to e-commerce want to verify and re-verify that they have made the correct choice. Many of these customers are lost if you force them to use their browser’s back buttons to do so. By placing a picture of the item to be purchased within the shopping cart, much of this need is alleviated, meaning lower abandonment for you. Provide Total Cost Estimates Early One of the most overlooked concerns of customers is their distrust of e-commerce sites when it comes to shipping. Maybe it’s the years of telemarketers selling garbage products for close to nothing and then making their profit on the shipping. Whatever the reason, it is important to allay fears of hidden costs as soon as possible by providing your users with a total cost estimate earlier rather than later. Is there something to be said for bringing the customer in with a low-ball lead price? Yes. But after the leader it is important to let customers know what they are really paying as early as possible so as to give a few moments to acclimate to the increase.

What happens from server to web browser

Each time you click on a link in a web page or type an address into your web browser you are making a 'request' for a certain document. That request is handled with the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and sent over the Internet to the server which holds the document in question. If all goes well the server responds by sending the document -- usually a web page of text and graphics. HTTP is part of the Internet Protocol (IP) suite. It is used by a 'client' such as a web browser to establish a connection with the server which hosts a particular website. The server waits for incoming requests by monitoring TCP port 80. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used to create connections between two computers on the Internet so they can exchange data. TCP has provisions for identifying the requesting computer and for transmitting data with time stamps so that it can be reassembled in the correct order once it arrives at its destination. There are several TCP ports which have standardized uses. TCP port 21, for example, is usually reserved for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for uploading and downloading files. Port 80 is usually used for HTTP. If the server receives a request string on TCP port 80 in the form of GET / HTTP/1.1 it will send a response code depending on whether the requested web page is available or not. A typical request goes like this: GET /faq. html HTTP/1.1 Host: mywebsite This is a request for mywebsite/faq. html. The 'Host' needs to be specified to distinguish websites which are hosted on shared servers. If faq. html is available the server will respond: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 12 October 2005 22:38:34 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT ...followed by the actual web page. HTTP/1.1 200 OK means that the requested web page is available. Other codes can also be returned. The code 404, for example, means that the server cannot find the requested page. The web page is sent via TCP as a series of data packets each with a header that specifies its destination and order in the data stream. The various packets can all take different paths to reach their destination. Each is sent through a router which polls other routers which are close by. If a connection with the first router is unavailable the data will be sent through another one. As the data is received the client (the web browser) sends back an acknowledgement. This ensures that all the packets are received within a certain time. If not, they will be re-transmitted by the server. TCP also checks that the data is undamaged. The data is reassembled in the correct order thanks to the sequence number of each data packet. Voila! The web page appears on your computer screen. The TCP connection can be kept alive for additional requests from the client. This allows several pages to be requested within a short time period without causing the overhead of opening and closing TCP ports. Either client or server can close the connection at any time.