7 Must-Have eCommerce Features for Combating Cart Abandonment Rate in 2022
The eCommerce industry has grown significantly over the past few years and holds a CAGR of 11.35% as per Statista. However, one major challenge most companies face today is the cart abandonment rate. It leads to low profits and customer loyalty, so you must develop an effective plan to increase customer retention rates.
Statista says the top reasons for cart abandonment are high shipping cost, complicated checkout process, credibility issues, etc. The following infographics offer insights:
Source: Statista — Reasons Behind Cart Abandonment Rate
You can resolve the policy-based cart abandonment reasons from your end. However, eCommerce feature development-based issues require the services of eCommerce development companies.
If you are hiring one for your website, you need to focus on the following eCommerce features for your platform:
- Create Guest login & Shopping Feature
- Ensure a Faster Checkout Process
- Build Credibility with Secure Payment Processor
- Offer all Popular Modes of Payment
- Leverage Advance & Mobile Friendly Designs
- Fast Loading Matters the Most
- Create Brand Value with AI-Based Features
Let’s explore each of these eCommerce features in detail.
Allow Guest Log-in & Shopping Feature
Statista says 66% of shoppers prefer guest checkout functionality as a top eCommerce feature. It allows them to browse on one screen and check out on another. This way, customers don’t lose their place in their cart when they decide it’s time to complete their purchase.
No one wants to spend time on things that seem unproductive. Shoppers find it a waste of time when they land on a website for the first time and are asked to create an account for shopping. It makes them feel like they’re not important enough to be customers, leading them to abandon their carts.
In order to reduce cart abandonment rates, eCommerce sites should allow guest checkout functionality. This way, shoppers can check out without creating an account or logging into their accounts. Hire eCommerce developers to integrate this feature on your website as it is the ultimate solution for reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate.
Ensure a Faster Checkout Process
Shoppers can find a reason to abandon their cart at any point in their checkout process. One major factor is how long it takes for them to complete their transaction.
It is where having an optimized checkout page comes into play: A seamless checkout page leads to a higher conversion rate, which means more orders and, therefore, more profit for your eCommerce website.
Moreover, 18% of shoppers tend to abandon the shopping cart when the website fails to offer quick checkout.
To optimize the checkout process, ask the development team to implement the following:
- Provide a clear and straightforward payment method
- Offer express checkout option (e.g., Pay with PayPal)
- Remove unnecessary fields from the checkout page
- Provide social media login option
- Use SSL certificate on the checkout page
- Provide a single-step checkout process for mobile users
Build Credibility with Secure Payment Processor
As a seller, it’s essential to have a secure payment processor. Customers want to know that their credit card details are safe. Choose a payment processor certified by global security standards such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) with an exemplary track record for payment processing, fraud prevention, and detection.
Some of the notable payment processors are PayPal, Stripe, etc. PayPal is a popular choice for eCommerce sites because it’s easy to set up and can be used across different devices. However, you need to pay a transaction fee on each sale, which varies depending on your monthly sales volume.
Stripe is another popular payment processor for new businesses. It has the added benefit of accepting international payments, but it’s a bit more complex to set up than PayPal.
Offer All Popular Modes of Payments
Adding credit cards, debit cards, Paypal, and other accepted modes of payments on your eCommerce platform is a must for any eCommerce website. Online shoppers expect a wide variety of payment options. If you don’t have them all, you could be driving away potential customers.
They ensure that your site isn’t losing out on sales due to misperceptions about how customers can pay for goods or services on your site. Losing clients for the lack of payment methods is a significant cause of cart abandonment.
So, if you want to reduce your abandonment rate, you must ensure that your eCommerce platform is equipped with all popular modes of payment. It will increase your sales and help you earn goodwill from customers.
Real Life Example: Top eCommerce platforms, such as Amazon and eBay, offer a wide range of payment options.
Leverage Advance & Mobile Friendly Designs
Source: Statista — Mobile Retail eCommerce
You can ensure that your eCommerce website looks great on all devices by providing responsiveness. You should also ensure that it includes a mobile responsive design so that your users will have an amazing experience no matter their device.
It is increasingly important because many people now use their smartphones and tablets to shop online rather than through a desktop or laptop computer. Mobile commerce has crossed the 70% mark, so your eCommerce website must include responsive design.
The problem with an unresponsive website is that users will be frustrated by how slow it loads on mobile devices. It leads them to abandon their shopping cart before they complete a purchase.
Fast Loading Matters the Most
If your page takes longer than three seconds to load, it’s a big problem. If a page takes too long, users will often abandon their cart before it has time to finish loading. To reduce your abandonment rate, optimize your site for speed and ensure you have no unnecessary files that could slow down your pages.
Fast loading is a vital eCommerce feature for any website. It directly impacts the success or failure of your online store. Your customers will leave if they have to wait too long for your site to load.
Here are some insights on how an eCommerce development company can speed up your website:
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) — A CDN Server enables the users to access your website content quickly. It reduces load time by caching files and distributing them across multiple servers worldwide, so your visitors can download them from the server closest to them.
- Optimize Images — Images are one of the biggest causes of slow page load times, so you should optimize them before uploading them to your site. Compress images by reducing their file size and removing unnecessary information like metadata and comments.
- Minimize Requests — Each time a browser has to request an external file, it adds additional time for your page to load, so you should minimize these requests by combining all files into one whenever possible.
- Cache Dynamic Content — Dynamic content changes, such as a news feed or live chat widget. You should cache it by saving its static version on your server so visitors can load it faster and you don’t have to generate it each time they request it.
- Compress CSS and JavaScript — It’s best to keep your website’s scripts and stylesheets as small as possible, so you should compress them by removing unnecessary characters like spaces, tabs, and comments. The fewer bytes they take up, the faster they can load.
Create Brand Value with AI-Based Features
Source: Statista — AI in eCommerce
Artificial intelligence is big business these days. Many major players are now focusing on developing features and functionalities that use AI for eCommerce purposes. It includes:
- Chatbots that can help make purchases,
- Predictive analytics that can anticipate what a customer might want next, and
- Virtual assistants that clients can use to search for items or provide information about an eCommerce site’s offerings.
Similarly, you can also count on Augmented Reality. It is a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing information about that image. This is particularly useful for shoppers looking for an item they want to buy but don’t know where it is or how much it costs.
AR also offers a more intimate real-life glimpse into how an item will look on them. For example, shoppers can now scan clothing items with their smartphones and see what they’ll look like before making a purchase. With AR technology, they can scan an object with their smartphone and get all that information without asking anyone else for help.
It is handy for online retailers who sell clothing items that are difficult to try on, such as shoes or dresses. These retailers can use AR technology to let shoppers see what they’ll look like while wearing different clothes, thus allowing them to make informed decisions about which items they want to buy.
Real-Life Examples: Brands like IKEA, Sephora, etc., are already making the most of it.
Wrapping Up
An essential eCommerce feature for the admin is the advanced dashboard. The dashboard allows you to analyze customers’ browsing patterns.
it offers you insights into the following:
- Are they looking at a specific product category more than others?
- Are certain pages or sections getting more attention than others?
Armed with these insights, you can decide how and where to add features for trimming cart abandonment. eCommerce website development in India can build this feature on your existing or new shopping cart at an affordable cost. It will not only improve your site’s usability but also prevent losing any potential customers.
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