business advice - Craft Focus Magazine

usiness advice
five steps to stop
shopping cart abandonment
It’s long been clear that setting up an online craft shop can both help find new customers
and provide an additional service to existing ones. The trick is to avoid abandonment before
purchase explains Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce and EPOS supplier, Actinic
One of the banes of an
e-commerce store owner’s
life is the discovery that many
more items are placed into
the online shopping cart than
are actually bought. This goes
under the term ‘shopping
cart abandonment’, and it can seem that an
enormous amount of potential business is
being lost.
Before we look into addressing the issue, it is
important to understand that potential buyers
place products into the cart for a variety
of reasons. They might just be comparing
costs, or it could be someone examining the
competition. Customers could be checking
your site before ordering by phone. Looking
through your online store is like browsing a
physical shop. Not everyone is a real prospect.
Having said that, a proportion of the
abandoned carts represent buyers who were
real prospects and then gave up. So in this
article I have listed some points to consider in
addressing this issue. They are mostly fairly easy
to implement, and they could have a dramatic
impact on your store sales.
1. Ensure buyers can trust your site.
Some people get nervous when they shop
online. You can address this by prominently
displaying contact details, including a phone
number and address along with a picture
of your shop, if you have one. Cover your
guarantee and returns policy and make a point
that under the Distance Selling Regulations
consumers have the unconditional right to
return goods.
Be very clear about the cost of shipping too.
The more up front you are, the more people
will trust you.
“With times being hard, and the
particular danger surrounding
more discretionary items like craft
products, an online presence is
critical”
2. Get the technology right. Ensure that your
e-commerce system allows shoppers to keep
their cart contents between sessions. In other
words, if their browser crashes, or they get a
phone call when they are shopping on your
site, you don’t want them to find that their
work has gone up in smoke when they return.
Your e-commerce solution should also pass
you details of customers that completed the
checkout except for payment. Contacting them
to offer help will definitely increase your sales.
3. Don’t irritate the customer. Try to make
your site as easy as possible to use with clear
icons for checkout and don’t force customers
to create accounts. I find it amazing just how
bad some sites are in this area, and I’ve often
abandoned orders through irritation.
4. Give your customer choice. If your customer
wishes to order by phone, let them. Also, try to
provide for different payment methods. At the
minimum you should accept credit and debit
cards and PayPal. New methods like PayOffline
(where people can pay at a shop near them)
may also increase your conversion rate.
5. Always measure. Use Google Analytics or a
similar package to see how people are using
your site. Analyse the information to find the
problems and fix them. There have been cases
of orders doubling from making minor changes
to the site. Try things, then measure them and
adjust. Nothing beats that approach.
I hope these tips can help to maximise the
return from your online store. We all need all
of the help that we can get. C
Further information
Chris Barling is CEO of Actinic
(www.actinic.co.uk) which specialises in
helping start-ups and SMEs sell online
with its e-commerce software and EPOS
systems. He has recently published ‘Selling
Successfully Online – over 300 top tips for
running an ecommerce website’. Available
on Amazon for £7.99 or download the free
e-book at www.actinic.co.uk/top-tips.
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