6 Causes of Shopping Cart Abandonment

There is one deadly disease striking down online shops of all shapes and sizes… SCA (Shopping Cart Abandonment)…

It can happen at any time, with seemingly no explanation. One minute, your customer has the item in their shopping cart and everything looks rosy, when suddenly… they up and leave the website! What went wrong?

With shopping cart abandonment rates at an average of 67% as of March 2014, this is not a phenomenon that can just be brushed off. At its core, this signifies a failure in conversion. Your website should be guiding customers through to a sale, and if they’re falling at the last hurdle then it’s time for a new strategy!

Another potential cause of this is the psychology of online shopping. No one is watching you, and no one will know if you just ditch your shopping cart to go off and have your dinner; it’s very different to doing the grocery shopping in a busy Tesco. If there’s no urgency to make the purchase, and no consequences to leaving your cart, why spend your money at all?

In 2010, Forrester Research found that a massive 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Why do they do this, and how do we combat it?

Using Landing Pages To Get More Customers

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a term used to describe a page on your website that is highly targeted towards a certain visitor. Most pages on your website will be quite general in comparison, focussed on saying who you are and what you do, but landing pages are more precise tools, aimed at converting visitors into more sales, more email subscriptions, more phone calls etc.

So all landing pages are webpages, 

but not all webpages are landing pages.

When Does My Website Need a Landing Page?

Landing pages become essential when you are running an email marketing campaign, Google AdWords or something similar. With each of these advertising methods, you’re trying to promote something specific on your website, for example, a new range of products. To maximise the effect of your promotion efforts, you need to make it super simple for customers… So instead of directing them to your homepage, in the hopes that they’ll go searching for your new products, you need to send them to a targeted landing page.

Google’s Faulty Redirects: How your mobile website angers visitors

Last week (June 5^th) Google initiated a major change. This change will only affect smartphone users, but could potentially have a devastating effect on your website (say the pessimists). It will be a while before we can talk about the real impact of this change, but it could be quite bad.

The issue is mobile optimisation. 

(Yes, you hear a lot about that on this blog!)

Not everyone’s website is optimised for mobiles, and sometimes websites are optimised badly. In the cases of poor optimisation, the following might occur:

Google Adwords: 7 Benefits for your Business

Talk around the office this week has been leaning towards Google AdWords, and how it’s drawing more and more businesses away from older advertising methods like the Yellow Pages. If you can even get your hands on the Yellow Pages these days, you’ll notice they’re a lot smaller than they used to be; visible evidence of their decline in popularity and effectiveness.

And if you’re looking to get a decent ad in the Yellow Pages, it could cost upwards of £200… After parting with your cash, your advert will be printed in a single Yellow Pages edition, and the next time you hear from them is when it’s time to renew your subscription. You will never know the statistics on how effectively it’s working for you, you can’t change the ad after it’s been printed, and you’re only reaching people who don’t immediately dump the publication! These are a lot of serious limitations.

A survey of 3000 Canadians found that the Yellow Pages only influenced 10% of purchases, compared to search engines influencing a massive 80%. 

Predictably, the internet is crushing this outdated advertisement medium!

So what is Google Adwords and what can it do for me?

Google Adwords is an online advertising service, provided by Google (shocking) that allows you to get advertisements for your business/products onto Google search result pages. Having mentioned Google three times in that last sentence, you probably won’t be surprised when I mention that Adwords has become Google’s main source of revenue. In 2012, Google’s total advertising revenue was $42.5 billion, and in 2013 that rose to $50.5 billion.

The reason it's so successful is because, quite simply, it is a fantastic service! But more on that later…

Example of a Google Ad for Humble Pie, Edinburgh