Shopping Cart Optimization: How to Make E-commerce Better

During the pandemic, many people replaced shopping trips with online shopping. Leobit has asked the experts how technology should be used to optimize the shopping cart and what software solutions will help to do this.

Blake Bobit, Solution Scout

It’s true that online shopping has gone viral during the pandemic, as many reports show, but there are always ways to improve that.

One way is email automation and analytics to improve customer retention, while others may include UX optimization, better ad targeting, or CMS systems. All of which generally require high-end software.

So to conclude, I guess the only way to get ahead of the curve is adopting the new tech and business messaging, with the use of the proper tools.

Embracing new software to help optimize business workflow can only help in the long run, and fortunately or not, now is the time to take big risks and make or break a new business model.

Daniel Roberts, Think Impact (Boston, MA)

While there has been a bigger focus on online shopping since the beginning of 2020 (though the shift to online shopping has been on the increase since Amazon and other big names started), the 2020 pandemic has even added much impact. And about the shopping cart optimization, undoubtedly, it does increase conversion when done right. But you need to know what your shopping cart needs conversion for.

Here’s an example. If you notice potential buyers leaving more goods in the cart than they pay for, you may need to optimize your cart for easier editing. Making it easy for shoppers to edit what they have added into the cart will not only give them a better shopping experience but will also save you the pains from recording a high impression that yields low conversion.

Sadia Ahmed, owner Frontier Blades (Hughesville, MD)

Due to the pandemic, consumers have been propelled to shop online to fulfill their shopping needs. Therefore, eCommerce businesses should capitalize on this opportunity by optimizing their website, particularly their shopping cart, to ensure increased conversions on their store.

Our business has employed various strategies for optimizing our shopping cart and increasing conversion rates. For instance, we offer our customers automatic discounts during the checkout process to propel indecisive customers to complete their purchases. Additionally, we have implemented notable online payment solutions, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Paypal, as a means for providing our customers a fast and secure checkout process. This approach increases the credibility of your business, as customers perceive these payment systems as highly trustworthy.

By optimizing our shopping cart by adding supplemental online payment solutions and automatic discounts to our customers during the checkout process, we have experienced significant increases in our sales.

Simon Dwight Keller, SDK Marketing

I worked with many e-commerce websites and learned a few ways to optimize the shopping cart:

1. Use 360 Product Images

Static product images do not fully represent the product you sell to the online consumer, such as the front side, backside, and side angle views. 360-degree gives online customers an in-store experience by elevating product display. Online customers can easily rotate products in all directions equally and zoom in to see the product’s necessary and essential details, such as design, quality, and features. Once customers get a real sense of the product’s quality, it will boost their confidence, and they move without hesitation from the consideration stage to the buying stage.

2. Offer Multiple Delivery Option

The more developed your shipping and delivery options, the less likely you will lose customers to them. This can be as simple as starting a partnership with delivery companies that cover more regions than you currently ship to. Or by providing options at the checkout to make sure the customer can choose what suits their needs, such as home delivery, office delivery, post office pickup, etc.

During the 2020 pandemic, contactless delivery also became popular – things like this speak to your audience and show that you want them to be happy with their purchases.

Simon Elkjær, Chief Marketing Officer of avXperten

If your customers aren’t redeeming goods or going through their purchase, then you might want to take a closer look into your checkout process and abandoned cart email strategies. Making sure that you provide customers with easy, convenient, and trusted payment methods will help quell any doubts they might have and encourage them to complete the process.

It’s also important for you to personalize your abandoned cart emails and make sure that your messages engage and speaks to them. Having a better-timed, warmer tone, and more targeted message might just give your customers the push they need.

Milosz Krasinski, Managing Director

It’s absolutely the case that people are shopping more (or even exclusively) due to the pandemic and in my opinion, this will continue now that people have experienced the convenience and time-saving benefits of doing so. It’s really important to optimize your cart if you want to make the most of your site. Quite often, people will put something in their cart as a kind of reminder and will plan to maybe return once they’ve shopped around a little. Optimizing your cart can help to nudge them toward the checkout rather than abandoning the cart. You can do this by:

Be clear about the security of your site to give the customer peace of mind. Show thumbnails of the items being purchased. All the customer to make changes from the checkout page Show progress, including ‘nearly there’ to assure the customer that it won’t take long

Make sure that your page load speed is at its tippety top best. In a lot of cases, the customer only needs a little encouragement in order to go ahead and make the purchase.

Andrei Vasilescu, CEO and Digital Marketing expert of DontPayFull

COVID-19 Pandemic had forced everyone to stay at home and along with most other businesses, brick-and-mortar stores were closed all around the world. Automatically, online shopping was the only way to get the requirements for most of the consumers. Even the shoppers who were passionate about roaming around the stores in person was ordering things online during the pandemic. This newly acquired habit of online shopping has become the regular practice of most of the consumers even in the post-pandemic world. So, yes, it is absolutely true that a great number of consumers have adopted online shopping permanently instead of shopping trips to the stores.

Along with the massive hike in online shopping, the number of shopping cart abandonment has also greatly increased. Online retailers are really struggling to reduce their abandoned cart incidents. Here are two shopping cart optimization tips which will actually work in 2021.

Reduce the number of fields.

Asking for too much information from the online consumers badly hurts the buyer’s experience and hence, many users leave their card without completing their purchase. Online shoppers always want a simple and precise process and they especially want to share their minimum information while checking out their carts. The presence of a series of fields on the checkout page annoys maximum consumers. It not only takes a long time and patience to fill all the fields, but also the online buyers start thinking whether they should share so much information online. So, ask only the relevant details from the online buyers when they check out their shopping carts.

Build trust with consumers.

One of the most essential things while optimizing for shopping carts is to earn the buyers’ trust. It increases the conversion rate and minimizes the incidents of cart abandonment at the same time. You must make your customers feel absolutely safe when they share their confidential financial information on your website. Display all the trustmarks and security logos in your website to reassure the buyers to enter their card details without

fear. Show Google’s Trust score with user ratings which encourages the consumers to shop from your website. Additionally, do clearly share all your contact details on your website to allow your customers to contact your business for any inconvenience.

Damien Knight, CEO of Workever

Shopping carts software makes checkout quick, easy, and safe, allowing customers to complete orders and pay for them without relying on third-party services. This ensures that your shopping cart should be able to accept credit card payments and synchronize with various payment gateways, as well as help with billing/invoicing technology that keeps customers informed about their orders’ status. Meanwhile, the shopping cart will keep an eye on the delivery process and notify the customer if anything changes.

Eric McGee, Senior Network Engineer at TRG Datacenters

A good shopping cart software will not only make it easy to access specific products/services, but it will also intelligently pull off other similar products that the consumer may be interested in. The cart can adapt easily to the user’s browsing criteria as part of a constantly changing technology field, which will further improve the shopping experience by keeping track of everything customers do. This will assist them in developing a more professional image of what your brand can do for them.

Veronica Miller, Cybersecurity Expert, VPNoverview

The main purpose of the Shopping cart is to help online retailers with large customer databases and to provide a streamlined self-service system.

Online shopping cart software also includes a payment option right within the checkout page.

Not only can shopping cart software process payments, but it can also automate transaction fees, add customized taxes depending on the customer’s location, send notifications or alerts when shopping cart abandonment occurs, and assist with inventory management. Overall, it helps the checkout process go much more smoothly, which enhances the customer experience.

Read also about the top 10 e-commerce mobile app features that help to increase customer loyalty.