5 CRO Strategies for E-Commerce That Reduce Cart Abandonment and Increase Sales

One of the most important CRO strategies for e-commerce is to look beyond the overall conversion rate and find where shoppers’ buying intent starts to weaken. Analyze and understand your funnel by traffic source, device, new versus returning visitors, product category, and landing page. Then compare where different groups drop off.

E.g., when returning shoppers complete their purchase but new visitors don’t, even after reaching product pages, then checkout isn’t the problem. New visitors may need more evidence before they are comfortable buying. You can optimize by adding clearer product information, stronger reviews, better demonstrations, or USPs that make the product worth the price.

A shopper looking for clothes may be wondering whether the product the like would fit them or not. An electronics buyer may need to know whether it is compatible with an existing device or there’s any warranty. Someone buying skincare may want to know whether the product is suitable for their skin type. These contribute to decision friction.

This can be solved by customer reviews, support conversations, on-site search queries, surveys and session recordings. Then connect that information to the point in the journey where they appear. E.g., if shoppers repeatedly ask about sizing to the website chatbot, make sizing information easier to access before the purchase decision.

What happens before a shopper reaches the PDP has immense impact on conversion rate. If your search results are irrelevant, filters are difficult to use or categories don’t match the shoppers’ needs, they may never reach the right and relevant products.

Start with your internal search data. Look for zero-result searches, repeated searches, filter combinations, and searches that lead to 404 (page not found) errors. You will discover what and how customers search for the products they need.

When shoppers add anything to their product, it doesn’t always mean they are going to buy it right away. The cart is often where shoppers see the full cost of the decision like shipping charges, reconsider quantities, compare products, check delivery dates, or question whether the total is worth it.

So, analyse what shoppers do immediately before abandoning, like:
– Remove a product after seeing shipping costs?
– Return to the product page?
– Open the returns policy?
– Apply a coupon code repeatedly?

Each behavior points to a different problem and can often give you a clearer understanding of the friction.

Once you identify friction, do not immediately redesign the page. Develop a hypothesis first.

E.g., mobile shoppers repeatedly open the size guide before returning to the product page. Showing key sizing information closer to the variant selector may reduce uncertainty and increase add-to-cart actions.

Now the test has a specific audience, problem, intervention, and expected behavior. This makes experimentation more useful even when a test does not produce a lift. A failed test can tell you that your assumption about customer behavior was incomplete or incorrect. Over time, those learnings give a clearer understanding of how your customers make purchase decisions.