When it comes to online shopping, customers want fast, easy, and informative features. Optimizing your shopping cart to provide an experience like this can increase sales and promote repeat business. Here are some of the best ways to create a seamless shopping cart experience for your customers.
1 – Include Detailed Product Summaries
Your customer just spent a fair amount of time on your website, browsing, choosing colors and sizes, etc. Once they get to the shopping cart screen, they want to review the items in their cart for accuracy prior to completing their transaction. If your summary page offers descriptions, colors, sizes, prices, and photos of the products, your customer is more likely to continue to the payment screen.
2 – Optimize Thumbnail Images
The photos of the shopping cart items should be high quality and big enough for the customer to easily see. When they land on the payment screen, these photos will remind them of the item they want to purchase and what it looks like. This can often deter them from changing their mind or abandoning their cart because the image that they loved when they chose the item is right in front of them again.
3 – Provide a Streamlined Process
When the customer arrives in their shopping cart, there should be no question about what the next step is. The call to action should be very clear so the customer can continue to the payment screen without having to guess where to go or what to click. Additionally, there should be minimal clicks required to process the order. The last thing a customer wants to do is jump through hoops, visit multiple pages, or provide more information than necessary to complete their order.
4 – Offer Popular Payment Options
Offering a variety of payment options will expand your audience almost immediately. Some people are perfectly comfortable using a credit or debit card for online purchases, but others are not. For this reason, it’s smart to offer options such as PayPal, ACH payments, and other alternatives to card transactions. Apple pay and Google pay are also great alternative credit card processing options to consider for your customers.
5 – Website Security
With the topic of online transactions, always comes the topic of security. Be sure that your website is 100% PCI compliant and that you have security systems in place to protect your customers’ data. Displaying the appropriate icons on the payment screen can help remind your customer that you care about their safety. If your website is secure and you hold certain security certificates, display those icons proudly and follow through by practicing fraud-prevention protocols in your daily operations.
6 – Online Chat
Customers are all too familiar with chat and messenger functions, so it makes sense to offer this in your shopping cart, as well. If a customer lands on your shopping cart or payment screen and has a few additional questions, a chat option can be the difference between completing the sale or abandoning their cart. Chat functions also save the customer the headache of making phone calls or sending emails to get their questions answered. The caveat is that if you offer the live chat, you need someone to respond to it, but this will help alleviate any frustration for the customer.
Conclusion
Optimizing your shopping cart experience is one of the best ways to decrease cart abandonment and increase sales. Make sure your cart is clean, crisp, easy to read, and looks great to the customer. Offering the functions listed above, among others, will help make shopping on your site a great experience while helping to increase website sales.
