530 – Don’t lose those sales: Tom talks Shopping Cart Abandonment

Episode 530 – Shopping Cart Abandonment
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and thirty two. Screw the Commute podcast today we're going to talk about shopping cart abandonment. This really sucks and costs you lots of sales, and this episode is going to tell you a bunch of reasons people leave without buying and what you can do about it. And when I talk about shopping carts, I'm really talking about shopping cart systems because you're shopping cart should be kind of the lifeblood of your online operation. It should handle all your broadcast emails and auto responders and split testing and all these other things that I've covered in other episodes, which I'll recap some of the episode numbers for you a little bit later, but this is a really, really important thing and can add a lot to your bottom line. If you fix up some of these things that make people want to buy from you, but they just don't do it. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode five twenty nine! That's why you should be adding digital products to your existing business. It actually applies to this episode, too. And if you're starting a business, it's the lowest risk, highest return potential business on Earth. So you want to go back and listen to that episode.

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[00:04:55] All right, let's get to the main event. Shopping cart abandonment. What is it? Well, it's when someone puts an item in your shopping cart and then never actually checks out. Now, sometimes the people are just trying to find the shipping you're going to charge, and maybe they can't find that until they go through the motions of buying. And then they go, buy your product on Amazon Prime with free shipping. All right. So one of the the shipping stuff and extra fees is one of the worst things you can do to make people leave. I mean, it's one of the best things you can do to make people leave without buying, so you don't want to do that.

[00:05:35] Sending them to Amazon thing is one good reason for not selling stuff that everyone else sells. For instance, I have a video product on how to start a retreat center out of your home. Now, where else can you get such an idea, right? Nowhere that I know of. And it happens to be one of the few DVD products I have left, but at ninety seven percent profit, I don't have to have exorbitant shipping and handling charges, which is one of the main reasons people abandon your cart. See, with the product being almost full profit, I could give free shipping and hardly notice the tiny reduction in my bottom line for that product. Now, even though that was a DVD, having digital products that are at least somewhat unique and immediately downloadable, that in itself can reduce shopping cart abandonment, that's what my last episode on digital products episode five twenty nine was about. All it has to have is a cool title and a description that makes people want it and you're good to go. They'll download it right away and you'll reduce your chance that they'll abandon the cart. Now, you may have heard on another episode about my tennis collection of DVDs and VHS tapes. See, people fanatic about a subject will buy anything they can get hold of on that subject.

[00:07:03] So having those digital products ready to download is a big, a big boon to your business. Put it that way. So anyway, let's get into the reasons people put something in your shopping cart and then leave without purchasing. These are the top reasons for cart abandonment, and the source was Baynard Institute, and I'm not sure how they did the study or exactly what the percentages they list mean. I think maybe one person could list more than one reason why they bagged out of a shopping cart. But anyway, here's the Baynard Institute's list. From the biggest reason to the smallest reason and a couple of them, I'll throw in some commentary, especially the first one I alluded to this before. The main reason is high extra costs like shipping, tax, handling fees and so forth. 60 percent of the people. This is my interpretation of what the percentages mean, said this is why they bagged out of the cart. And this just happened to me recently. I went to buy a nutritional supplement from a well-known YouTube guy. And when I went to check out the shipping was eleven dollars. Now, there's no way this small bottle should cost $11 shipping just for standard shipping, which I might add was very slow, and it got up into the 80 and 90 dollars for fast shipping. So it was just totally ridiculous. So I went to Amazon and I bought his product with free shipping, and it was here the day after two days later.

[00:08:47] Now, maybe the guy wanted to keep his in-house labor costs down and wanted to discourage me from ordering directly from him. And he may have wanted me to go to Amazon. I don't really know. But I do believe that if that was his mindset, that's pretty shortsighted because had I ordered directly from him, he would have gotten my email address. But by forcing me to Amazon, he has no idea who I am or how to reach me. And when you consider the fees he paid to Amazon, he could have only charged me maybe $4 shipping, and he would now have the email address of somebody who can spend a lot of money with him. All right, so keep extra cost as low as you can or even take a slight loss on them so you can get that customer's info in your database, not Amazon's. Ok, so that's the first thing, high extra cost shipping, tax fees and so forth. Next at thirty seven percent was forcing people to create an account. People hate this, especially if you don't have a guest checkout right next to it, where they can just get it done and get out of there. Twenty eight percent or thirty seven percent of the people hate that. All right. Next was two long and complex of a checkout process.

[00:10:14] I'm going to address that a little bit later, but twenty eight percent said that was, you know, that's why they left. Now, this other one is couldn't see the total order costs. Say so, all the stuff was hidden, you can see the price of the product, but all these other things that people hate. You couldn't see that until you go through the whole process. And and let's see twenty three percent of the people bagged because of that bagged out. Now, some of the stuff is, you know, I don't want to say it's out of your control as long as you have good quality hosting and a good quality shopping cart. But 20 percent left because of website errors or crash in the in the cart. That's amazing to me, I didn't know that because, you know, with my shopping cart system, it's so reliable, it's just crazy. Ok, the next one, 19 percent people, this didn't trust your overall look and that your credit, their credit card info is going to be safe. So you've got to have a good quality, professional looking site now doesn't have to be super fancy. It just has to look professional, work properly, load fast, give people the impression. Sometimes you can go for a better business bureau or trust badges to put on your site. That's cool to people like that, but you just have to make sure the thing works good and you look professional because, well, it kind of reminds me of, I mean, even looking professional can make you even if you're not professional.

[00:11:55] Better look better. The famous New Yorker cartoon was a dog sitting at a computer, and his buddy, which was a dog, said, Hey, you can't get on the internet, you're a dog. And the other guy said, Hey, when you're on the internet, they don't know you're a dog. So. So even if you're a schmuck, you I mean, I don't, you know, I don't push this because I'll come after you if I find you're a rip off, especially if I taught you how to be, how to do this stuff. So. So anyway, you got to look professional and give people confidence that their stuff is safe. Ok, so so trustworthiness was 19 percent. 18 percent delivery was too slow, so that supplement guy. Not only were the fees too large, so he had a double whammy. You know, my new sale for this this holiday season is a triple whammy, but this guy had a double whammy to the bad. Fees are too high and delivery was too slow, so delivery was 18 percent. And and this study was done before the supply chain crisis, you know, so every a lot of things are being delayed nowadays. But but when I see a product that says 11 days or more to get it, I'm immediately leaving and going looking somewhere else.

[00:13:15] All right, so that was 18 percent on delivery was too slow. Next at 11 percent was bad return policy, so, you know, Zappos is a good example of the great return policy. It's like, hey, if those shoes don't fit, send them back. No problem, no hassle. The people love that. So but 11 percent, if they if the return policy looks shaky, they didn't. They bagged out. Then eight percent didn't didn't like the fact that there was not enough payment methods, now I have Visa, MasterCard, American Express and PayPal. I don't have Discover and that as far as I know, I never lost a sale because of Discover. Plus this is, like I said, only eight percent of people. But you know, it's not going to be too long before it's going to be commonplace to have like bitcoin or something, as you know, people pay. I mean, that's already exists. It's just too cool for school for me. I even know what the heck that stuff is. All right. But that's eight percent. And then the other one is kind of out of your control. Credit card was declined at four percent. So these are the the the main things I'll go over and real quickly again. Hi, extra cost forcing you to create an account. Too long and complex of a checkout process, couldn't see the total order cost until clear at the end.

[00:14:44] Website errors or crash. They didn't quite trust you. Delivery was too slow, return policy sucked, didn't have multiple payment methods and credit card decline was out of your control. All right. So now Maynard Institute took this a little bit further in that they actually collected 41 different studies on this topic, and they found that the average cart abandonment rate across all industries that they covered between 2006 and 2019 was sixty nine point five seven percent. That means that three out of five customers abandon the cart. I mean, if you can just reduce this by one person, that's a lot of money in the course of a year. Forrester Research also, we're looking at the the total loss to this was $18 billion yearly. All right. From cart abandonment. Now, here's the thing every shopping cart on Earth has abandonment problems. I don't care if it's the terrible piece of crap your web host gives you to try to get your hosting service or if it's a half a million dollars custom cart for some big chain store. The card I use and represent has two or multiple, but two really powerful features to reduce cart abandonment. One is called shopping cart sell through and you want to check if you're considering any other carts. Do they have these features? This is where you can put a mini sales letter right in the cart to keep people excited about their purchase.

[00:16:31] And it's customized based on what they put in the cart. Of course, you know you can't just have a generic one. I mean, you could, but that's not as good as a custom one based on what they purchased put in the cart. And then there's another feature called the short description where right next to the title of the product. Once they put it in the cart, you can have a couple lines of sales copy about the product. All the big benefits of it to again, keep them excited about their purchase. Now, this is another feature when I said to there's more than two. One other feature of the kick start cart, which is the cart I represent and I've used for over 20 years now. Is on big ticket purchases. So I use what is called a one step checkout that gets them directly to the finish line fast, remember if you remember back to the bonus stuff? Twenty eight percent of the people complained about too long and complex checking checkout process. So this takes some boom, boom boom right to the checkout. Do not pass. Go do not collect two hundred dollars. Collect a thousand dollars like for your big ticket sale or not, if you make it too hard for them to buy. Now on smaller price products, I tell the car to use the two step checkout, and that has a continue shopping button that can be customized to send the person to a product or group of products that I know they're interested in based on what they just put in the cart.

[00:18:08] For instance, if they put a public speaking product in the cart, when they click Continue Shopping, I'll send them to other public and professional speaking products. This really ups the average sale per customer. Now I talk a lot about shopping carts in past episodes. I'm going to give you the episode numbers here 519. All this is going to be in the transcript and the show notes. 519, 283 and episode 10. All the time you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number takes you right there. So with Kick Start Cart, the cart that I've been representing and using myself for all these years. You get unlimited free one on one tutoring forever to help you learn to use and maximize your sales using the cart. And you can get your free 30 day trial. And keep in mind, even though this is a paid service, you can save a lot of money. You can get rid of some of your broadcast services and all that because it's all combined in one. And I remember when I first started before this was even invented the you know, you'd have to combine a bunch of different companies to make something work.

[00:19:21] And when it didn't work, they'd each blame each other and it was just terrible. So having all this in one place means if something does go wrong and very seldom does it ever. The same the one company is designed to make it fix it, you know, so. And like I said in the 20, almost 21 years I've been using this cart, there's been very, very few of those instances. Ok, now one thing I should mention while we're on this topic of abandonment is the topic called retargeting. Now I'm not going to go in great depth on this, but because it isn't technically a way to keep people from abandoning your cart. What it is is a way to get them to return and finish the sale. And I'm sure you've all experienced looking at a product or even getting ready to buy it by putting it in the company shopping cart. And for some reason, you just don't get around to checking out whatever those reasons were that we mentioned above, or maybe you got busy or whatever. Well, then you start seeing ads for the same product or you start getting emails reminding you to complete your purchase. You know, if you had gotten to the point where you put your email in. Now, when you looked at that particular product or put it in the company's cart, they did a thing called Pixel U.

[00:20:45] It's kind of similar to cookies, and then they collect all those people that looked at a product or, you know, pretty much they collect what's called an audience of the people that say, looked at a product. Now, if you put it in the cart and they email you, that's very specific. That's not a group of people. But in in the case where you just looked at a product and you see it following you around the internet, they're there. They can advertise back to everybody they know that looked at that product because of the pixel that they did to your browser like a cookie. You know, it's not exactly the same, but for our purposes, good enough. And so they know that you visited. They don't know who you are, but they know that you visited because you've got pixels. So then they collect all these people and then they advertise right back to you. And the crazy story I've told it on some other episodes is by a long time ago, my girlfriend needed a specialized kind of bra or something really quick for some event. And and so she knew I had Amazon Prime. She said, Hey, buy this for me. Will you OK? You know, so she sends me the link. I buy it and it's the end of it, you know, to deliver it to her and her house. Boom, done.

[00:22:03] All right. Oh no, it's not done. Bra ads started following me all over the place for, I don't know, six months or a year. I don't know if I gained too much weight from COVID. Maybe I'll need a bra. I don't know. So. So anyway, shopping cart abandonment, you don't want it to happen to you. You want to do whatever it's going to happen. All right. That's the No. Nobody on Earth has gotten this to not happen. It happens. But you want to reduce it and don't make these mistakes that are making people jump out of your cart really quick, you know, like the extra fees and you know, all the things that I mentioned here. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hey, check out our campaign to help out those people with disabilities. And hey, you'll get good training from me. So all the money during this holiday season that you spend on training with me is, like I said, almost for sure, tax deductible to you for training purposes. But I am going to take the money and give it to the scholarship program for the persons with disabilities. So that's why I call it a triple whammy. You get good training, you get a tax deduction and those people with disabilities also get good training because of you. All right. So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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