How do you make sure your website visitors checkout after filling the shopping cart?

Maybe you know the feeling: you have done your utmost to find products, your shopping basket is filled and you want to checkout. But something stops you, doubt strikes you, you want to use another discount code or the delivery time is disappointing. In short, you leave the website and end up buying nothing.

We regularly see this behavior in website visitors. In the data, we see that visitors spend a lot of time orienting, scrolling through list pages, actively filtering and looking at many products. It seems that they really intend to make a purchase. But why do they still leave the website after filling the shopping cart? And how do you ensure that these visitors do complete their purchase? We found out!

In the following four experiments, I show the situations we encountered.

1. No post-order information vs. post-order information.

This was an A/B test for a website with relatively expensive products, think furniture. Often, furniture cannot be delivered immediately. As a result, visitors are likely to be unsure of exactly what will happen after the order is placed. Because the dropout and clickback rates on this page were very high, we suspected uncertainty. Generally, uncertainty causes visitors not to place an order. So this is what we want to prevent. 

In this experiment, we placed three reassurance messages under the order button. The first two have to do with the ability to check the order. And the third one indicates that you don't have to be stuck with your product. This had a positive effect on conversion and we had a lot less shopping cart abandonment.

2. No ability to continue shopping vs. ability to continue shopping.

This example is about a supermarket where visitors buy on average about 30 different products, i.e. a full shopping basket! While shopping, there is no need to check the shopping cart in between. But we saw that visitors do so regularly. In the data we saw that when someone wanted to continue shopping from the shopping cart, they often used the back button in the browser or the home button. Both inconvenient. Using the back button in the browser brought you to the product page of the product you had just added and using the home button brought you to the homepage and thus not to the shop. So people felt the need to continue shopping. In the original test, we therefore added 3 different buttons to continue shopping. Because people shopping online often know exactly what they want to buy, we added a search bar in the shopping basket in addition to the “continue shopping” buttons. This allows the visitor to continue shopping directly from the shopping cart. This was a huge success!

3. New arguments vs. a thank you.

In this experiment, we knew that there is a lot of competition from other companies selling the same products. Therefore, in the current variation, there are some USPs to show visitors that this is a good website to order these products. But besides giving a positive image about this website, it is also new information. These arguments have not been shown on the website before. We know from visitors that when they have made a choice, you want to confirm them in that choice. In doing so, it's best to give them arguments they already know. New arguments can actually lead to confusion. The USPs may not have been the right arguments to persuade visitors to buy. 

In this experiment, we omitted these new arguments. Instead, we gave confirmation by thanking the visitor for their choice. This had a positive effect on conversion!

4. Lots of attention to the discount code vs. little attention to the discount code

In this example, you can see that a lot of space is taken up by the discount code field. When I see this myself when I am shopping online, I immediately start looking for a discount code for this website. So do other website visitors. Such a large eye-catching field for a discount code often goes hand in hand with a high exit rate. Bummer! These visitors want to go buy, but the lack of a discount code makes them hesitate. Why spend the full amount when a discount is also possible, right? 

To prevent visitors from leaving the website without a discount code, we made the field significantly smaller. The assumption was that if visitors did possess a discount code, they would do their best to find it. By making the field smaller, it is less noticeable, so people without a code will not be triggered to search for one. This had a positive effect on both conversion and click-through rates and we saw fewer exits.

We also tested this at a website that almost always offers discount codes. Don't! These visitors almost always have a discount code in their pocket. If they can't find where to enter it, they leave the website and don't buy. After all, it's a waste not to use your discount code.

Take away: prevent shopping cart abandonment:

1. Ensure certainty on the shopping cart: be aware what effect elements on the shopping cart have (discount code, USPs, search function).
2. Examine the function of the shopping cart: how do visitors use the shopping cart? As a place to collect products for purchase, as a favorites list or as a comparison function? Don't push your visitors toward conversion if they are not yet ready for it. Enable the desired behavior. Or, as we once did, remove the shopping cart if it has no function....

BONUS: Shopping cart vs. no shopping cart

What is the function of your shopping cart?

Actually, it is quite normal to have a shopping basket on your website, after all, we are used to it. Yet we see different behavior in every shopping cart. Shopping cart behavior depends on how your visitors use the shopping cart. So before experimenting, try to research what the function of your shopping cart is. And if the shopping cart seems to have no function...

Our most exciting example of all. The experiment where we skipped the shopping cart. Are you curious what happened here? Send me an email 🙂

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