Help stop checkout escapees?

[Frocked]

Does anybody have any info/hints&tips/advice etc on customers abandoning a sale through checkout?
People are putting items into their basket but gradually this number reduces somewhat on the way to payment...what experiences do other Sites have? As already asked by somebody else; is there an average ratio for this for online apparel sales?
I would really like to hear others views & experiences to help with this, before we action any upgrade on www.frocked.co.uk.
Many thanks!

[jestep]

Shopping cart abandomnment is pretty much unique to an industry and a website in general.

Just after looking at your website, I would imagine that it will always be very high. You sell apparel which is normally not a problem, but yours is high-end / expensive. The higher the price, the higher the abandonment, especially in a case where someone can buy cheaper clothes somewhere else.

I would work on making your brand very strong, making your website amazing, and make sure you are marketing to the right audience. You need to do everything you can to make sure your visitors trust you, know you, and are the type of people that buy expensive clothes.

[Frocked]

I think you have 'more-than' hit it on the head with that answer jestep...thanku! This has also answered some other questions, & confirmed a few of my own thoughts too!!

[xenu]

jestep provides a great clue to all online businesses. Your potentials have to trust you. They have to have a clear understanding of what you do - what you sell - and what they can expect. If they only begin to learn this on the way to the checkout - they leave the cart behind on their way to greener pastures.

[philscanlan]

As a user, I do this all the time simply to have it calculate shipping, tax etc. with never actually having the intention of going though with the purchase.

Perhaps consider a tool that will do this without forcing the user to go through part of the checkout process.

[KeeKee]

I have used the cart to calculate shipping and such, I don't waste the time anymore, shipping should be upfront. If I cannot easily find a page to expain shipping and return policy I don't stay.

[Eddy Tan]

Looks like you are doing ecommerce without web analytics. Try out ClickTracks Funnel report. It will show you which page most visitors dropped off. Once you know the page, you can use the Navigation report to view the page and see the number of clicks on every spot on the page. Now you see where most visitors detoured.
Confirm that with the Path View below in the Navigation report. It shows all the pages that visitors went after the page. Next you can make changes to the page to minimise the number of detours. Make sense?
Note: The funnel report allows multiple paths to the order page be analysed and that will reveal even more. It is unique.

[TheGarty]

Hi Frocked,

This topic is something i have been looking at heavily in the last couple of months. We have made some small changes to the way our website works over time and have tracked our results.

The most important thing is to mesure your performance, make changes than continue to mesure... thats pretty much my full time job at the moment.

There are some good articles on this kind of thing at MarketingSherpa (here is a recent article that i found interesting: www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29776)

THe most important thing is to try things... if they dont work then change it back! At least you know what doesnt work and can move forward from there ;-)

[edhan]

I too encounter problem like this due to the shipping and handling charges as it is pretty expensive to send overseas. Our postal service here is more expensive than some of my physical products. I have product that costs $8 but to send overseas, the postage costs $20. So when comes to checkout, they will simply drop the order.

[brian.mark]

Shopping cart abandonment is one of those ongoing challenges all web businesses face. We've been working on it for a few years, with assistance from several outside companies and now starting to try Offermatica for some A/B split testing to see if moving some elements around helps get people through the process. It's all about trying a change, measuring the results, then repeating. Nothing online is an exact science, but there are some best practices.

Brian.

[chriskn]

I'm looking at this from a customer perspective. You ask for my personal details before I see the bit about postage costs - I'm suspicious already. As others have said it needs to be very apparent right up front what the total cost is going to be, because what most of us do I believe (and particularly for higher priced items) is use the web to shop around to find the best deal. It may even be worth trying a bookmark facility so people can come back to the item easily when they have shopped around. Like your stuff, though, so good luck.

[DrTandem1]

I like the way Amazon.com's shopping cart works. You can place items in your cart, not purchase and then return weeks later and see that the items are still there. They can even tell you whether the price changed.

Of course, this isn't practical for most sites, but I think Amazon has done a good job focusing on the customer/visitor. Since you need to spend at least $25 before you get free shipping, I often will put a book in my cart and come back later when I put another item in the cart to break that threshold before purchasing.

Most here have mentioned shipping and taxes as a major cause for cart abandonment. I agree. The fewer surprises at checkout, the better. So, offer a way to get free shipping.

Taxes depend on the how your government decides that you must tax. In the US, it is generally the same as snail-mail order. The buyer doesn't pay a tax, unless the seller is physically located in the same state. This has allowed internet sales to flourish and often offsets shipping prices. Many shopping cart services can't get this through their collective heads and think it's the destination of the item.

The state governments are looking at various ways to stop these taxes from escaping. They fail to realize that taxing will cause a drop in revenue due to lower income taxes collected. So, in the meantime, use it to your advantage.

[begabloomers]

Frocked, just an observation.

I buy clothes online. One particular retailer I love has a very difficult navigation arrangement. So I simply add everything and anything I am interested in to the shopping cart then delete as I wish later. It is much easier than trying to find the item again.

The problem is that when I see the combined total - I get cold feet and decide I really don't NEED all these things.

[StevenAllen]

http://YourWebTutor.com is a teriffic tool to reduce shopping cart abandonment. We use it on our site and it helps alleviate consumer concerns while answering the questions that are most important to you and your client

[xenu]

Steven Allen, thank you for that tip, I wasn't aware of anything like that. I am normally just like the average user, and back out of anything when it seems like it is more than I bargained for.