If you’re reading this, then you likely have been frustrated when you’ve looked at your Shopify and/or Google Analytics dashboards….

….you may have even lamented out loud “why are the cart and checkout abandonment rates so damn high on our Shopify store?!”

This is certainly one of the most aggravating parts of running an ecommerce site because you have done so many things right up until this point…

…you were able to create products the visitor wanted, your site helped the visitor find the right product(s) for them, and they made it to the last steps of the process before a purchase is completed.

And then they bounce right at the end of the process.

First Know That You Are Not Alone…

If you have never seen ecommerce industry wide stats for cart and checkout abandonment, then this might be both comforting as well as upsetting.

Comforting because you will know that you aren’t alone.

Upsetting because you may feel there is a hard cap on how much improvement you can make to be able win more of this potential revenue that is slipping away.

So let’s be clear now that there is always room for improvement and that even small conversion improvements on the cart and checkout pages have significant impacts on revenue growth (because optimizations at the ‘bottom of the funnel’ flow directly into increased revenue numbers).

By aggregating 37 different ecommerce studies that included measuring the cart abandonment rate for large numbers of online stores, the Baymard institute reports the average shopping cart abandonment rate for ecommerce sites is 69.23%

Seeing that, industry wide, almost 7 out of 10 people who get to the cart page do not complete their purchase may “normalize” the abandonment numbers you’re seeing for your own Shopify shopping cart and checkout pages.

But it doesn’t mean you have to accept your store’s current abandonment numbers laying down.

Here are 2 things you can do quickly that will help convince more of your visitors to complete their purchase:

Customize Your Shopify Checkout Page As Much As Possible

While I believe Shopify is for many reasons the superior choice for an ecommerce platform, it is by no means perfect.

One of the major drawbacks of Shopify is a lack of customizations that you can make (or A/B tests that you can run) on the checkout sequence.

Two of the main reasons why people abandon filling out checkout forms are that they “fail to build trust and credibility” and that they “fail to reinforce benefits”.

Adding items to the cart is a “soft” decision that doesn’t have any real sense of finality or exchange. Completing the checkout form is a “hard” decision.

When people are faced with “hard” decisions, it is useful to have gentle reminders of the benefits they are receiving as well as reasons to feel comfortable and trusting of the company they are about to give money to.

While for the most part, we can’t change your checkout, you do have some design control over the top section of the page.

Let’s take a look at an example of a Shopify store with the most basic version of this section:

The company simply has their name at the top of the page. There is no logo, no branding, no stated benefits, etc

Here’s a company that is doing more with that section of their checkout:

This company has a full width image that features their logo, their company name, and a piece of credibility when they state they were on the TV show ‘Shark Tank’.

I believe they could do even better by having an image of their product or having some sort of a ‘Before / After’ photo of better posture after using the product than the current image of a smiling woman.

Even though their execution isn’t perfect, it is clear this second example demonstrates more trust, credibility, and benefits that the first example.

If you are not taking advantage of your ability to add this full width image to keep the customer experience of your brand consistent as well as express a benefit or two, then make doing this something that is near the top of your ‘To Do’ list now.

Be Abundantly Clear About Your Shipping Costs & Delivery Range

A study from Statista shows that 4 of the top 8 reasons why shoppers abandon their carts are related to shipping.

The biggest offenders are ‘Expensive shipping’ and ‘No free shipping’. The next two are ‘Unaware of shipping costs’ and ‘Slow shipping’.

Offering free shipping and making it clear to your visitors that you ship for free would address the top 3 issues in one fell swoop.

Of course, may not work for the economics of your business to offer free shipping on all orders but there may be a certain total cart value threshold that it would make sense to offer that perk at.

If you do offer free shipping starting at a certain threshold, then it may be worth adding a dynamic calculator on the cart page that tells the visitor how far away they are from gaining the free shipping perk.

That could look like this:

And once the threshold has been reached, the same section would notify the visitor their order currently qualifies for free shipping.

At the very least, you want there to be as little ambiguity as possible about the specifics of shipping as possible.

The easiest way would be to offer a simple, clear flat rate shipping cost and state the range of business days it will take to arrive (while also stating that you offer a rush delivery option if desired).

The next easiest would be adding a shipping rate calculator to your cart page, which you can see how to do from Shopify’s knowledge base here.

Clever Solution for Offering Free Shipping

Because offering free shipping solves multiple issues people have related to cart abandonment, it is likely worth testing out a few ways to make that happen for your customers.

There is a good chance that you could raise prices of your most popular items by $5 (assuming these products already cost at least $25) while offering free shipping on the order.

Even if your shipping costs were previously $5 and the customer therefore is paying the same price either way for the item and having it shipped to them, people have proven over and over to be “irrational”.

While the total cost is the same, there often is greater appeal in seeing “product price + free shipping” as opposed to “product price + shipping cost”.

Some price testing may be the key that unlocks your ability to offer free shipping without crippling the economics of the transaction (and at the same time increasing transaction volume because less people abandon their carts).

Small Reductions in Cart Abandonment Have Big Impacts on Revenue

Any improvement that positively impacts your cart abandonment rate has a clear and direct impact on increasing your sales and revenue.

If you are unsure exactly how much more revenue you stand to earn each month by improving your overall conversion rate (which goes up when cart abandonment goes down), check out this free Conversion Calculator.

Even a small increase in conversion rate can lead to a material increase in revenue (not to mention that the higher your conversion rate is, the easier it is to afford bringing more traffic to your site).

If you are curious, you can also check out a few case studies for Shopify stores where we helped implement conversion improvements and run A/B tests.

One store saw their monthly revenue increase by over $48,000 per month through the tests we ran and changes we implemented together.

Another Shopify store grew monthly revenue by over $55,000 per month as a direct result of conversion gains won through our work together.

And if you’re interested to see if we can help your Shopify store attain similar growth through improving the site’s conversion rate, fill out this quick Google Form.

At the very least, we will share a few custom tips and ideas for your site when we get on the phone so you really only stand to gain by getting in touch!