How do You Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Your landing page could be a marketing expert’s dream, complete with credibility factors, bold text, and a natural eye path. But what happens when a customer proceeds to checkout and they become suddenly hesitant of their purchase because of a poorly designed page?

With this in mind, should website optimizers focus their attention on the landing page or the checkout page?

Certainly both pages deserve particular attention, but optimizing your Shopping Cart seems far less obvious. A recent article at MarketingSherpa sheds some light on this topic.

Here is a short excerpt:

While marketers toil away on their landing pages, getting more and more people to advance to subsequent pages, the average ecommerce shopping cart is abandoned nearly 60% of the time. In response to this high number, the company in this article conducted a multivariate test, that is, they tested elements on a page in different combinations and then isolated the results of each variable. They discovered a dramatic increase in conversion rates by simply adding an instructional headline, yellow information fields, and a blue button that read “Click Here to Order.”

So whichever page you optimize, you must keep in mind one fundamental yet remarkably simple rule: simple changes in page design elements can yield a significant increase on conversion.

Earlier this year, we published an article that addressed how minor changes to your website can have a major impact on your conversion rate. With a multivariate test, we discovered that even a highly-optimized page can be improved with small changes in the headline, page design, and color.