Top Reasons for Cart Abandonment #1: Required Registration
One of the most common forms of wrong thinking in eCommerce is not putting yourself (as the business owner) in your customer’s shoes.
Imagine that you are in a brick & mortar store ready to buy an item, you get to the register, and the clerk demands that you become a member of their store before they can ring you up. Online retailers do this all the time thinking it’s either a way to become more exclusive (therefore attracting clients) or because having an email address feels overly important. Here are the barriers to entry this kind of thinking creates:
- It slows the customer down.
- The thought of creating one more username and password for a store they might never return to is frustrating.
- It makes the customer work.
Here are some alternatives:
Offer Guest Checkout
Online shopping is all about fast, convenient purchasing, so a guest checkout option is pertinent to landing the sale. Ebay offers customers the ability to avoid signing up and lets them check out as a guest. This gives the customer a sense of control and the ability to decide which option works best for them.
The flip side.
Some major retailers, like Amazon and Ebay, are dependent upon repeat customers. One of the things that keeps me coming back to Amazon (aside for the reliability and awesome shipping options) time and time again, is that once I’m logged in, I can literally place a new order in three clicks. With sites like these, I love the ease of what having an account offers me. If I’m not forced to create an account, I might not ever know the convenience it offers.
Skip Registration Entirely
One of our sites, Litographs.com, completely skips registration and goes straight to checkout. Often with this approach, there will be an option somewhere along the way to create an account if the customer so desires. This is a really nice way to get the user straight into the purchasing process as quickly and easily as possible, again, giving them the easy option to do so if they choose.
Register Using Social Media
Etsy requires users to create an account before checking out. However, they offer the ability to register using their Facebook account, which is much easier and less time consuming for the customer. This also lends itself to easy sharing options.
