We’ve been working with the members of our Growth Quarters recently to help them find ways to selling more online in between markets. We found that reducing online shopping cart abandonment is one of the most important things you can do to make sure your sales are on the rise.
While setting up a good online shop and having enough products to put in it is important – and so is driving traffic to the online shop – one of the easiest ways to increase the sales of your product is to make sure that once people are on your site that it’s easy for them to purchase. There’s no point in doing all this work if the purchase part of the whole process is putting people off. Three simple things you can make sure you sell more online are:
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Make shipping options clear
If your customer doesn’t know what the cost of shipping is until one of the final stages of the shopping process, they might get “shipping shock” and decide not to purchase, and close your site or navigate away before actually buying. Make sure that there are multiple places on your site that show what the shipping cost will be, or find a way to build it into your prices so that you can offer free shipping over a certain dollar amount.
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Offer a variety of payment options
Customers like options – and this point is especially true if your product’s price point is reasonably high. Utilising a service like AfterPay so that customers can spread their payments out – but you get the full amount immediately – can be a really attractive option for customers. Although a service like this will cost you a small percentage of the sale price, it may work out better than losing the sale altogether. PayPal is another third party platform that many customers are familiar with and feel confident in using as a secure site.
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Having a secure site
Online shoppers are much more savvy these days and if you don’t have that little padlock or https address showing that your website is secure, they are unlikely to trust the site with their credit card details. Depending on your set up, this might not necessarily be the case even if your website itself is secure, so double-check the process yourself.