Decrease Abandoned Shopping Carts, Increase Sales
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Online stores may require less of a monetary and time investment than their brick-and-mortar cousins, but they still require work. What's more, they come with certain disadvantages inherent in not operating on a face-to-face basis. For example, you may have fewer clues as to why someone might apparently choose to buy something (put it in their electronic shopping cart) and then abandon it. This article will discuss some of the more common reasons that web users do this, and help you address them so you can increase sales on your own web site.
The virtual market has arrived, and with the growing number of online stores, it seems like the trend is here to stay. Unlike real time stores, one does not need to invest heavily in virtual stores, so even small business owners find the deal lucrative. Virtual stores are easy to create and manage, which has added immensely to their popularity. Depending upon the investment that a business owner would like to make, both in terms of time and money, one can create a virtual store for the business.
The convenience that these virtual stores offer to the online shopper cannot be matched by real time stores. The ease of being able to compare several different manufacturers of a product and then purchase it online, along with having it delivered to your door step, is magnetic. While initially buyers were skeptical of products that they saw online and not in reality, over the years, online dealers have established a golden reputation for themselves, which has added to an increase in online shoppers. Most online stores offer money-back guarantees, much like real time stores, which removes the fear of being cheated from the prospect's mind. Almost all commercial ventures today understand the growing importance of e-commerce, and virtual stores are the gateway to commercial activities on the Internet.
Though having concluded that virtual stores are convenient to both the seller and the buyer, it is a known fact that simply setting up a virtual store is not the answer to increasing online sales. In fact, despite adopting extremely sophisticated advertising and quality products, it is a fact that for every online transaction that is completed, almost four times as many are deserted. Apparently putting up several payment gateways and adopting highly developed shopping cart software does not seem to seal the deal either. These techniques work at only drawing the prospect's attention and moving him or her towards a possible sale. However, despite these efforts, it has been estimated that on average, 75% of shopping carts are abandoned before the deal can be closed. It is no wonder, then, that abandoned shopping carts are considered the biggest bane of e-commerce.
An abandoned shopping cart is an incomplete transaction, which the prospect deserts before the final deal is sealed. Since the ultimate goal of all e-commerce activity is sales, of course a conversion left halfway through the process is extremely damaging to the business. Businesses that operate online spend huge sums of money to set up commercially viable virtual stores and are then aghast at the large number of abandoned shopping carts. Therefore, one can safely conclude that decreasing the number of abandoned shopping carts a site produces (and thus, hopefully, increasing the number of transactions completed) is as important as setting up the virtual store itself.
The solution comes in a two-phase package. The first phase is understanding the reason why the percentage of abandoned shopping carts is so high, and the second phase is ensuring that these hurdles and problems are eliminated.
Next: Reasons for shopping cart abandonment >>
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