Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

In our e-commerce studies, we found that 20% of the overall task failures in the study — times when users failed to successfully complete a purchase when asked to do so — could be attributed to incomplete or unclear product information. Leaving shoppers' questions unanswered can derail a sale or even worse, make shoppers abandon not just the purchase, but the site as well. One shopper in a recent study could not find the information he needed in the product description, so he left the site to search Google for more product information. In the course of his search, he found another site with the same product, a more complete description, and a lower price.

If you’re providing product information that your customers are looking for, for all the products they’re looking for as they continue to add items to their shopping cart, you will convert more of those customers and they won’t abandon your ecommerce store to find the item on another. The sad thing is, when those customers do a search for that product information and find it somewhere else….they steal your sale of that product but other products as well. This is a problem with shopping cart abandonment which you need to solve.

The good news is, you can solve it, let’s explore how.

Have you ever considered why there is a “Have a question?” call to action on Amazon, ABOVE the product description?

The answer is, to ensure the customer can find the product information that THEY are interested in quickly….before the bounce, abandon their shopping cart (and any products in it), and search on Google to find the answer they need in order to purchase. The painful truth is, if you don’t provide all the information to customers that they’re requiring before converting….somebody else will, and they’ll be the one who the customer purchases from….and you’ll be the one wondering why customers add items to their cart and then not convert.

Don’t be that person!

Answerbase sees that up to 75% of the product questions asked through a product page convert to a sale, not only purchasing the product they asked about but other products as well. That’s a huge amount of customers with full shopping carts, easily getting the information they need pre-sale and converting into a paying customer.

There’s also an additional benefit above and beyond just you reducing your shopping cart abandonment rate. What happens to those customers searching on Google, having abandoned a different ecommerce store in order to ask their product questions? You can be the store that has that information, and they can find you to fill their cart on your store and convert. Let’s explore how that works.

When a customer abandons an ecommerce and semi-filled shopping cart, they go somewhere to find that information they need to convert the sale. Where do they go? They go to Google.

Customers turn to Google to answer their pre-sale product questions, and the sites providing those answers are the ones that convert the sale. You can not only reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates by providing great product information to your current visitors, but you can also use that same product information in order to grow your organic search traffic and get those abandoning other carts to your store.

All questions about your product should create a new landing page for every popular Q&A thread, optimized for search engines and added to a sitemap that Google will gobble up and spit out in their results….results that come up when customers ready to purchase are asking those questions about products that you’re selling….so they’re lead to your store and purchase from you.

See this example to the right, where an Answerbase customer has the two organic placement as customers search for product information on Google. This simple way of getting those users who abandoned another cart (or customers in general) to your store, simply by answering your current customer’s questions, leads to year over year organic traffic growth to your site.

Best of all, given the fact that these customers are already primed to purchase….that traffic you get to your pre-sales Q&A content is more valuable that normal Google search traffic. Answerbase sees that new customers coming from organic traffic to Q&A content have an average lifetime value (LTV) up to 2x higher than those coming from Google as a whole. This attracts more valuable customers to your store, that purchase from you longer, simply by ensuring that your customer’s product information needs are met.

We hope that this post has been informative and helpful to decrease shopping cart abanonment rates on your ecommerce store. Of course, as a provider of ecommerce Q&A software we’d love to be the ones to power this activity on your site….so we’d encourage you to View Details about Answerbase Ecommerce Product Q&A Here…..or feel free to contact us for a demo or start a free trial to see how your customers engage in creating valuable Q&A content for your site. They ask, you answer, Answerbase does the rest:)

Hope everything else is well with you and your business and let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.