Do you use Magento as the framework for your online retail store? If yes, this is a good big step towards conversion. Hundreds of Magento stores operate daily all over the Web and make profits. However, Magento does not give you all the right answers right out of the box.
Recent studies show that around 67% of virtual shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. Around half of these cases are caused by the complexity and excessive duration of shopping and check-out processes. That is why your first priority is to make sure your customer feels at ease while looking for an item and sailing through check-out procedures. There are three basic steps that will cut your cart abandonment rate and increase your sales immediately.
Make the checkout process linear
Non-linear checkout frustrates customers as they feel they made a mistake or something went wrong when they see the same page again. It also seems to them that they have made almost no progress after having filled in several graphs or pages. Make sure a customer never has to see the previous page again.
Forget about upfront registration
A recent study by Econsultancy shows that 25.6% of online stores visitors are likely to abandon their shopping carts if asked to register before checkout. Most people don’t understand why they need doing this, get irritated and leave without paying. Be smarter – ask for registration after the payment or, even better, – provide an opportunity to checkout as a guest.
Use layered navigation
It is strongly recommendable to use layered navigation for price step at your Magento store. Customers filter products mostly by numeric attributes, like price, weight, size, etc. With the help of special extensions, you can provide your customers with different types of convenient display modes: slider, dropdown, from-to, etc. These features do not only save time, but also look more compact and take less space.
As a Magento user, you should always keep in mind that this is an open-source framework, therefore, there are lots of opportunities to make your Magento store more user friendly in your own way.
