The Basics of Reducing Website Abandonment

Website abandonment has been a frustrating trial for online merchants for years. Without fail, consumers visit online retailers, add items to their cart, and before they can complete the purchase, exit the website. The goods left unpurchased are particularly frustrating to online merchants who can’t seem to figure out why people have a change of heart at the very last moment.

Since 2005, UpSellit has developed sophisticated campaigns for thousand of online businesses that address the reasons for abandonment and recover otherwise lost sales. Over the years we've gathered an extensive list of different ways merchants can optimize their site to reduce website abandonment.

This article represents a small sample of the information available in UpSellit’s new eBook, 25 Tips & Tricks to Reduce Abandonment. First, we’ll take a high-level look at the types of abandonment, differentiating each category by where it occurs on a site. Next, we’ll discuss what you can do to make a positive impact on abandonment at each stage of the customer journey.

The Types of Website Abandonment

On an average website, a shocking 96.7% of users abandon before completing the desired action. This means that of all visitors to a site, only an average of 3.3% convert. So, where are all the visitors dropping off? There are five different types of abandonment and each describes a different drop-off point for users.

1. Website Abandonment is a sort of catch-all term that describes a user leaving from anywhere on a site before completing the desired action.
2. Bounce occurs when a visitor lands on a page and abandons before interacting with the site in any way, as if bouncing off the page.
3. Product Abandonment occurs when site visitors advance to at least one product page and exit without adding any item to the cart.
4. Cart Abandonment is when a consumer adds a product to their cart and exits before proceeding to checkout.
5. Checkout Abandonment describes a user beginning the checkout process and exiting the page before completing the purchase.

Now, let’s move through each type of abandonment and talk about a few things you can do immediately to reduce abandonment and keep customers converting.

Website Abandonment

High website abandonment rates can stem from a huge variety of factors, most of which are concerned with the website as a whole. Whether abandons are the result of design shortcomings or faulty navigational tools, any component that permeates a website entirely can contribute to website abandonment. However, it’s important to note that a high website abandonment rate doesn’t mean it’s time to rebuild from scratch. Keep in mind these tips to keep users engaged across all pages:

Mobile Optimization – Mobile browsing is getting more popular by the day. As smartphone adoption increases, the volume of mobile shoppers continues to grow, making a mobile-compliant website more important than ever. To accommodate zounds of mobile shoppers, pay attention to the following crucial elements:

• Button Size – When it comes to navigating through a website, fingertips are much less precise than cursors. To promote accessibility, it’s best to meet or exceed the touchscreen manufacturer recommendations of making buttons at least 7x7mm or, roughly, 20x20 pixels. You can go larger, but don’t sacrifice aesthetics altogether for the sake of big buttons.
• Responsive Design - The odds that someone will stay on your website if it doesn't render properly are very slim. Unlike desktop computers that come in a few standard resolutions, screen dimensions of mobile devices span the gamut. Modify your site to adjust widths and borders dynamically for screen resolutions ranging from 320x480 to 1280x1024 and beyond.

Speak Their Language - According to Common Sense Advisory, 43.6% of people will not make a purchase if product information in unavailable in their primary language. Analyze your traffic sources and determine the few most important languages in which to deliver content. By using location-detection plug-ins, you can serve users dynamic language content to fit their country.

Bounce

The average bounce rate among online merchants is around 36%. On the typical e-commerce website, over one third of visitors exit from a landing page without interacting with content whatsoever. To convince users to stick around and look through your content, you need to make sure their first moments are pleasing, intuitive, and in line with expectations.

Reduce Load Times – Patience is a rare commodity, especially online. According to studies from Akamai, 40% of site visitors will wait no longer than three seconds for a page to load. To shed some digital heft and deliver contently more quickly, try the following:

• TinyPNG – Take any .png images used on your site and put them through TinyPNG. Without any noticeable dip in quality, this tool reduces image file size, which translates into lower load times for the user.
• Clean Code – An online tool called Minify will reduce the size of CSS and HTML documents without altering their functionality. Removing unnecessary tags, comments, and whitespace shaves kilobytes off of back-end documents. Shrinking file sizes at every corner is key when every millisecond counts.

Fix Broken Links - No browsing can be done on a broken page. Do what you can to make sure that any and all outdated or unused pages no longer receive traffic. To keep users from starting at a dead-end,

• Carefully Maintain Ads – Make sure that any PPC campaigns point directly to relevant, functioning pages. If you plan on ending a promoted sale, edit ads appropriately or redirect users to a different, more relevant landing page.
• Crack a Friendly Joke - Don't hesitate to replace the default 404 Error page with something a little more interesting. Design an image or joke that’s properly aligned with your corporate identity to try and keep users engaged and happy with your brand.

Product Abandonment

Product pages provide customers with a chance to thoroughly evaluate what you have to offer. A product page is where a consumer gets to evaluate your goods, determining whether they want your product enough to purchase it here and now. The following tips will help you create an enjoyable and convincing browsing experience that reduces product abandonment.

Predictable Layout – Whether it’s a pair of shoes or a piece of software, most people have made an online purchase at one point or another. To make these purchases, consumers expect a certain, predictable order to things—prolific product descriptions, high-quality product photography, and big, bold call-to-action buttons. Stick to the familiar format and feed users’ expectations to make them feel comfortable. If a user has to dig in order to figure out how to proceed with a purchase, they likely won’t bother.

Visual Quality – According to our research, replacing low-quality images with high-quality replacements boosts conversion rates. While browsing products online, the provided images are typically the only chance a shopper gets to get a good look at what they’re about to buy. High-quality image and video content make sales that words simply cannot.

Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is a hotly discussed topic among online retailers. It’s easy to understand why: 70% of filled shopping carts are abandoned. By the time a customer has filled their shopping cart with products, it’s safe to assume that there’s some intent to make a purchase—and yet a majority of users act to the contrary. According to various studies, unforeseen costs and security concerns drive potential customers away in droves. The following tips can help you roll shopping carts over to checkout.

Clear Policies – An unexpected shipping fee is the most commonly cited reason for shopping cart abandonment. Some companies believe withholding shipping prices until late into the checkout process will lock customers into a purchase despite large fees. Not only is this unethical, it’s also entirely false. Be upfront with customers regarding shipping and return policies to reduce cart abandonment rates and earn shopper loyalty.

Offer Support – It’s reasonable to assume that a customer may have a question or two they’d like answered before finalizing a purchase. A consumer that reaches out for help only to find nothing to grasp will be more likely to abandon. Somewhere in the cart, display support email addresses and phone numbers that customers can contact for assistance. Additionally, an automated chat solution is a great, constantly available way to deliver users to relevant information.

Checkout Abandonment

An average of 4.8% of total site visitors reach checkout. Of this select group, only 56.3% complete their purchase. The other 43.7% decide against purchasing—often due to encountering an error. Creating a website that efficiently moves users through checkout to the end of the conversion funnel is essential to closing sales online. Consider the following philosophies to reduce checkout abandonment:

The Path to Confirmation – When money is on the line, ambiguity tends to make people uneasy. To this end, you’ll want to make the checkout process as simple and predictable as possible to keep users calm and progressing.

• Single Column - Arrange all necessary checkout fields in a single column that stretches down the page. By maintaining a simple and direct flow from start to finish, users will easily move through checkout with no prior experience.
• Properly Labeled Buttons – Each button has a function; make this function abundantly clear to the user. Consider replacing any ambiguously worded "Continue" buttons with more precise alternatives, such as "Continue to Confirmation" or "Continue to Shipping.”

Easy Input – A successful checkout is as short as it is simple. A brief checkout form is more than a convenience for customers; it also limits the amount of time a client has to decide against making a purchase. Keep things quick with the following:

• Immediate Input Feedback – Make of use of a plug-in that tells users whether their input is properly formatted. By helping key in data in real-time, you’ll limit the number of times a user has to go searching for the error, which is frustrating. Close the gap between checkout and confirmation by helping the user on each step of the process.
• Automated Input – The less work left to the consumer, the better. An easy way to take some of the burden off the user is to dynamically populate fields with information provided earlier in the process. A drastically underutilized piece of data is a user's ZIP code. By using plug-ins, such as Zippopotamus, you can generate the city and state associated with each ZIP and fill in forms automatically.

These actionable tips, when properly implemented, can make a big difference in reducing abandonment across all areas of your website. However, there’s still a lot of optimization to be done.

To learn more actionable tips that will reduce website abandonment, be sure to download a free eBook: 25 Tips & Tricks to Reduce Abandonment. UpSellit provides a full suite of abandonment solutions, designed and custom configured to reduce abandonment at every stage of the conversion funnel. For more information or to see our solutions in action, schedule a demonstration with our team today.