Add to Cart vs. Finishing an order

What % is good?

[Hubie]

I've noticed a ton of "add to carts" on my website, and a very few # of conversions.

what's a standard rate for this? I know inevitably there will be customers who add to cart, then leave the site. But at some point I need to get nervous.

I use all the tricks (free shipping worldwide) no hidden costs, or anything like that to deter folks from completing checkout.

Any advice how to get browsers to actual customers? I'm stuck at "add to cart"! unless this is normal for estores...

[BradleyT]

Are they proceeding to checkout and then abandoning or are they not even making it past the shopping cart page?

[axgrindr]

I recently did a lot of work on my conversion from add to cart to checkout and it seems to be helping.

yesterday: 16 add to cart, 9 abandoned, 7 converted
day before: 15 add to cart, 8 abandoned, 7 converted

These are fairly high ticket items they are buying so the tweaking of the checkout system is paying off.

I recently decided to quit worrying about search engine rankings so much and start working on converting the people that are already on the site.

[ectect]

This is a very good thread and well worth a read to the end [webmasterworld.com...]

[Hubie]

how about some tips on how to improve those add to carters to conversions?

we've established there will always be window shoppers who have no interest in buying period.

what about the others who are adding to cart and not buying?

I've got free shipping to anywhere in the world. i have limited checkout to as few steps as humanly conceivable. i use attractive "proceed to checkout" and "submit order" buttons as recommended by the forum.

what else is there?!

[axgrindr]

Right. Even though everyone says that cart abandonment is something you just have to live with it doesn't mean you should not work on your checkout process.

I recently did what you did and made the checkout process a more streamlined numbered process. Step 1 of 3, Step 2 of 3, etc.

I made the whole checkout process secure. Everything after the shopping cart page is secure now instead of just the credit card details page (a couple of customers requested this).

I made an option on the registration page for the customer to be invoiced via Paypal instead of registering in case they don't want to give up any personal information at all (quite a few are using this option).

I put the United States and the United Kingdom at the top of the country pulldown list instead of Albania :-)

I added javascript warnings on the personal info page for every data entry field. If the email address is formatted incorrectly a warning pops up, if a field is left blank a warning pops up, etc

Another thing I did was to keep a close eye on what was being added to the carts. I noticed that one specific item was being added by many customers and then never purchased.
I lowered the price of the item by $20.00 and conversion went way up for that item (since it is a digital download item with no overhead we have the luxury of playing around with pricing).

[jsinger]

I've got free shipping to anywhere in the world.

You cant spend "conversion rates," so avoid over-stressing that stat. We fiddled with many things (even offering free shipping in the USA). We use some pretty sophisticated software to monitor cart abandonment. Nothing so far has done much to improve conversion. In fact we totally dropped all levels of free shipping lately and now see a slight sales decrease and a huge improvement in the bottom line.

We had a few products with high abandonment levels. Lowering their prices did little to improve things.

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Cart abandonment was a huge buzzword, even in the mainline press a few years ago. You'd see silly headlines about "Billions Lost to Cart Abandonment." I'm guessing that ecommerce retailers are learning that the cure may often be worse than the disease.