Picture the scene: through your PPC campaign, your SEO strategy, or from the sheer force of your branding, you’ve brought a potential customer on to your website. Your sales copy has left them swooning, your pictures have them dazzled, and you’ve presented them with the chance to experience the holiday of a lifetime.

They tremble with anticipation as the mouse cursor hovers over the “Book Now” button, and then, with a sigh of relief at having found just what they were looking for, they finally click. Instantly, they are then transported to the 7th circle of Consumer Hell – the Unfriendly Shopping Cart. After a few frustrated minutes of being bombarded by confusing forms, sign up demands and error messages, they leave the site and run straight into the arms of a nearby competitor who is all too happy to profit from all of your hard work  

All too often, websites break their backs trying to get customers on to a site and persuading them to buy their products or services, and when it comes to actually letting the customer make a purchase they put every imaginable hurdle in the way. If a customer is ready to buy, the hard task of finding and persuading them is over. Here at LeadGenerators, we’ve found that working with our clients to reduce shopping cart dropout can be one of the simplest and fastest ways to make a website more profitable.

If you want to cut down your dropout rate, here are six ways to make sure your customers see the purchasing process through to the very end.

We’ve lost count of the number of e-commerce sites that ambush their users with a registration page as soon as they hit the buy button; this is an enormous turn off. If at all possible, have a shopping cart design that allows people to make a purchase without registering. If registration is unavoidable, try and work it seamlessly into a later stage of the process.

Reduce the purchasing process to the smallest number of pages you can – LeadGenerators have had great success in the past compressing 4-5 stage bookings into just 1 or 2 pages. The more stages your customer has to go through, the more chances you are giving them to get bored, frustrated, and go somewhere else.

Asking for fewer details can, of course help with reducing the number of pages your customer has to click through. Try and look at your shopping cart with fresh eyes – just how much information do you need from a client at this stage? If you are asking for a postcode, do you really need to ask for a county as well? Is it essential that you know your customer’s title and middle name, or their date of birth?

Take just enough details to make the booking. Once your customer is committed and the booking is made, you can follow up and collect passport numbers, multiple passenger details, insurance codes, and any other vital little pieces of information that you need. Just don’t overwhelm them at the first point of contact.

Ever been working for hours on a painstaking piece of work, finished it, closed it, and the second after it disappears realise you’ve forgotten to save? That’s roughly the same sensation a customer will get if they’ve painstakingly filled in a detailed form, then clicked on the wrong button and lost all their progress.

Once someone has begun the purchasing process, remove as many distractions and superfluous pieces of site navigation as possible. Keep it simple, keep it focused, and keep your potential customer on track to prevent them accidentally navigating away from the shopping cart.

People are a lot more trusting of internet purchases than they were before, but many will still shy away from giving their credit card or personal details unless they are absolutely certain that they will be protected.

Make them feel as safe as possible; firstly by keeping your branding, graphics and logo in full view throughout the purchasing process. On some sites, the shopping cart pages look as if they belong to a totally different website. If a customer feels that they have gone to a third party site, the level of trust drops considerably.

Reassure them of the security of your site. Include logos and written assurances that the purchasing process is totally secure. Holiday companies should also mention any financial protection they enjoy. So, if your services are protected by ATOL, AITO, ABTA and so on, then say so!

Finally, make sure you can back up your assertions of security! Use HTTPS secure hosting, and see that it notifies the customer when they enter a secure server. If a shopping cart feels like part of the site, feels secure (and is secure!), then you’ve got a much better chance of retaining your customers.

If all else fails and your customer gets part way through the booking process before abandoning it, follow it up – it is possible to code your shopping cart in such a way as to notify you when someone drops out. It requires a little technical time, but is well worth the effort. The customer’s computer may have crashed, the phone could have rung and distracted them, or they might have been baffled by some part of the shopping process. Send them an email, and see if you can help.