The Holiday season is upon us and for consumers, this means spending time with loved ones and spending money on gifts for them. For retailers, it is a time when a lot of focus is put on enticing consumers enough to get them to part with their hard earned money on products and services.
That said, getting ready for the holiday season will more than likely be top of mind for retailers and other small businesses alike. Many will have already highlighted key dates, mapped out a holiday season sales strategy and started planning and implementing a range of tasks and activities. These may include but aren’t limited to creating holiday-themed offers, making sure that there will be enough stock to fulfill orders, crafting marketing campaigns that may include content and social, tech aspects such as making sure a website can handle a potential spike in traffic, A/B testing and the list goes on.
The holiday season preparation ‘to do list’ can be quite exhaustive and if not planned well, can lead to a last minute rush and being overwhelmed. This is a point that you don’t want to reach because being overwhelmed could spell disaster!
One podcast that I listen to on a regular basis is Xero Gravity by Xero that covers a range of very insightful small business related topics. One of the recent podcasts (below), ‘Innovation from the inside out‘ was with Amit Mathradas, General Manager and Head of Small Business North America at PayPal. The discussion focused on intrapreneurship and the similarities between intrapreneurialism and entrepreneurialism.
During the course of the discussion, he mentions some interesting facts about shopping cart abandonment with the most significant one being an abandonment rate of 70%! When looking only at the US market, this equates to about $4 trillion being left in abandoned carts. That’s a LOT of money that businesses are missing out on.
The Discussion in a way presents listeners who may face this problem with the challenge of thinking about ways of lowering abandonment. One critical thing that he briefly mentions is streamlining the checkout process to make sure that customers actually make a purchase. Other items include payment options offered, free shipping and so on. At the end of the day, it is all about making the process easy for the customer.
Another interesting fact that he points out is that as far as PayPal goes, 30% of all of their transactions are coming from mobile. This just goes to show that mobile shopping is on the rise and if you aren’t already mobile, now is the time to get mobile.
Reducing shopping cart abandonment is a whole topic in itself and there are number of approaches that can be taken to reduce it. As a start (as mentioned in the podcast), taking a look at and streamlining the checkout process can go a long way in that regard as outlined in ‘Optimizing your payment process for a successful holiday season‘ by WooCommerce. Another way that you may not even think of is by sending a reminder email such a point number 6 in ‘Send These 7 Emails to Your Small Business Customers‘.
These are just a couple of examples of things that can be done to reduce abandonment. At the end of the day, you would have to look at your stores’ entire checkout process, do some research on what works and what doesn’t, see if any changes need to be made and if so, make the changes if they will be of benefit.
Do you have any tips for reducing shopping cart abandonment? Share them or any other thoughts by leaving a comment below.
No comments yet.