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Abandoned shopping carts are the biggest problem of any online business that takes itself seriously. eBiz Miami always encourages clients to look at their online shopping cart usage. We send regular reports, always showcasing the good, the bad, and the ugly.

As Web Site Magazine once again brings to our attention, the “bad” will always happen: for one reason or another, online shoppers will keep on skipping the “Check Out” button. To keep this from becoming “ugly” you, the online retailer, need to make sure that those reasons have nothing to do with you and the way you prepare the online shopping experience to your web site. Survey after survey shows that customers will turn around due to poor web service

92 percent of surveyed consumers have abandoned a website because of a disappointing Web service. 64 percent of shoppers will make only two attempts to purchase a product before bailing. But it doesn’t stop there – 52 percent of shoppers will turn to a competitors website to buy a similar product and about one in three (32 percent) won’t buy the product at all. (Web Site Magazine)

Grim numbers, it seems, but all is not doom and gloom. There are ways to keep more of the customers in to the end, until they click the “Check Out” button. Here are a few:

1. Tip-top. Make sure your web site is in tip top shape from the technical point of view. No hick-ups, no slow loading of your pages, no confusion in the selection and ultimately paying process.
2. Make sure you have what you sell! Many online stores syncronize their real life inventory with their online stock. A very good practice, if you don’t want to dissapoint. But make sure dissapointment doesn’t come after your customer wasted a good chunk of his time choosing, deciding and attempting to purchase your product, only to see at the end the dreaded “Out of Stock” message. The best practice to avoid this, is to take the product off line alltogether until you are sure you have it, or to state up front that you will have it at a specific date.
3. Make sure you show what you sell. How would you feel if you went into a real store and baught, say, a pair of shoes, put them in a box and went to the register to pay for it, only to get home and find a totally (or slightly) different pair inside that box? Generic pictures of a product are a thing of the past. In the age of cheap digital cameras, it pays to take pictures of the real thing you’re selling, so as to not run into trouble with your customers even after they paid for what you are to send to their door.
4. Offer discounts. Most people start their online shopping experience by comparison shopping. If they got to your store and found the same price on an item from two other web sites, they will tend to go with what they found first. Keep them to your store, by offering discounts or by offering an advantage on buying from you over the others: faster shipping (if you’re in the shopper’s area), discounts if the item purchased is over a certain amount or if purchased together with another item (Amazon and eBay retailer do it often), discount on a future purchase, etc.

Or, you can simply contact eBiz Miami, Inc. to learn how we can help make it easier without the headaches 🙂