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Why Customers are Leaving Your Ecommerce Store

Failing to close online sales is a common problem for ecommerce store owners. Time and again, we see a shopper add several items to their shopping cart, only to leave the online store without taking the final purchase action. 

The best way to solve this issue is by analysing what’s causing customers to drop out of the buying process. Then, using specific strategies for each reason for abandoning their shopping cart, you can minimise customer drop-off and increase your ecommerce sales.

In this blog post, we will discuss some of the top reasons why customers leave an eCommerce store before completing their purchase.

Let’s get started.

Your website is slow.

Are you seeing an unusually large number of customer checkout pages with sales that haven’t been completed? It might be due to the slow speed of your eCommerce store. 

Customers are indeed getting increasingly impatient with delayed page loading, especially since a recent survey determined that the first five seconds of page-load time have the biggest impact on conversion rates.

But don’t worry — there are ways to improve your site speed and keep those all-important conversions coming in.

You can start by testing your website’s current speed. There are plenty of free tools online that allow you to do this, but we recommend using PageSpeed Insights. It’s a tool created by Google that tests your website using data from Google Chrome users.

Aside from telling you your website speed, PageSpeed Insights will also give you improvement suggestions. For example, it may tell you to resize the images you’re using on your website. It may also tell you to minify the code on your website.

Improving your site’s speed can often be a fairly straightforward process, though some changes need more time and effort to implement than others. 

Your checkout process is complicated.

The checkout process is the most important part of an eCommerce store, because that is where people finally decide to either check out or abandon their cart. Understanding why customers leave during the checkout process and paying attention to friction points can help improve conversion rates.

When an eCommerce customer adds a product to their cart but leaves the website without purchasing, it is referred to as a shopping cart abandonment. These customers do this all the time for several reasons, including receiving confusing checkout instructions and needing to fill out forms with unnecessary fields.

Take the time to see the checkout process from a customer’s perspective. Is every step necessary? Are there certain steps that could do with a bit of tweaking? Identify friction points and determine how you can address them.

Let’s say you’ve been collecting abandoned shopping cart data for some time now. You discover that 41% of customers aren’t checking out because they receive confusing instructions. 

You know that these customers would have purchased if they had received clear instructions. So you create a FAQ page section that goes along with your checkout form and increase your revenue per visitor by 10%.

That’s only one example. By carefully analysing your checkout process, you could find more ways to make the checkout process more convenient.

Your product pages are ineffective.

Your product pages and photos aren’t exciting your customers. Instead, they’re choosing competitors who create more engaging eCommerce pages. This is a problem, but it isn’t as complicated as you think. 

Once you know what the root cause of the problem is, you can start to make a lot of changes in how you design your product pages, resulting in more sales.

Spend time making sure that your product pages are well organized, produce quality imagery, and provide detailed information about your products. Don’t make your customers work hard to find the information they want before deciding whether or not to buy.

A potential customer should spend four seconds or less on a product page before finding out everything they need to know to make their decision. This includes the price and availability, any special offers or discounts, the shipping cost and estimated delivery date, any necessary size charts or colour options, as well as any reviews from other customers.

Your website doesn’t seem trustworthy.

A website needs to look professional, authoritative, and trustworthy if you want to sell your products and services online.

The credibility of your website isn’t something that can be considered just within the confines of Google’s algorithm. There are other things to consider, such as social proof, authority links and even reviews.

To get users to trust your website, you will want to make them feel confident about giving out personal information – especially email addresses. One way you can accomplish this is by providing a prominent privacy policy on your site and featuring a lock icon in the footer of each web page.

Conclusion

In the end, what we’re ultimately trying to accomplish is customer satisfaction. So, make sure you’re addressing the points above if you want to reduce customer abandonment rates in your store and convert more visitors into sales.

For more information on designing your ecommerce site, increasing sales or recovering abandoned shopping carts, call us on 02 8211 0668, email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.