In the digital shopping world, the path from "Add to Cart" to "Purchase" is fraught with potential drop-offs. Two critical strategies can make or break this journey: removing obstacles and adding incentives. While they aim for the same result—converting browsers into buyers—their approaches differ significantly. Let's dive into how each strategy plays a crucial role in optimizing your checkout process.

These will result in the same thing, but they are of a different nature. Let’s look into each. 

Remove Obstacles

Removing obstacles is all about decreasing the likelihood of cart abandonment.

According to Baymard Research, which you can find here, the 5 top reasons for cart abandonment are: 

1. Extra costs (e.g. shipping) are too high. 

2. The site wanted me to create an account

3. Delivery was too slow

4. I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information

5. Too long / complicated checkout process.

Let’s work through each of these and see how EliteCart can help you:

1 - Unexpected Costs

The shock of unexpected extra costs, especially shipping costs that appear during checkout, is a major turn-off. EliteCart's solution? A free shipping bar that transparently communicates costs right in the cart. This approach tackles the surprise factor effectively, ensuring that customers know what to expect before hitting checkout. Your store offers different free-shipping thresholds for different markets or does not offer free shipping at all in some markets? You can set all of that up in EliteCart, too!

By the way, even if you have stated that information about free shipping elsewhere, e.g. in a banner in your store, be aware of the phenomenon called “Banner Blindness”. Our Dynamic Shipping Bar is much more visible and, due to the animations, gets the customers attention immediately. 

2 - Requirement to Create an Account

This is a quick fix. You won’t need EliteCart for this, but unless you have very good reasons to activate account activation, we highly recommend to deactivate this / make it optional in your shopify settings. 

3 - Missing Express Delivery Option

In case you don’t already, we recommend offering express shipping. Don’t underestimate how much customers are willing to pay for the extra service. 15€ / 15USD is not an unreasonable extra charge. And even if you have to pay out of your own pockets on top of that, the extra conversions you’ll gain will surely make up for it.

4 - Lack of Trust

Building trust is an important part of your website. A clean web design plays a crucial role, but on top of that you should add trust-enhancing logos or information to your website - particularly close to the checkout button, because that’s where decisions are made. 

EliteCart offers several options. You can

• Display logos of your store’s payment provider. Because brands like Visa and Mastercard have a good reputation, adding those icons signals trust. 

• Display a lock icon on the checkout button. Sounds trivial, but small visual cues like this increase customer trust.

• Display other logos or images. E.g. you could show you Trustpilot Score, industry awards or certificates you have won, logos of newspapers you have been in, etc.

• Display any text. Even a simple text like “Trusted by 1000+ customers” will have a positive impact. Ideally, go more specific to create resemblance with your customers. E.g. if you sell strollers, say “trusted by 1000+ parents”.

Selling in multiple languages? Everything above can be localized in EliteCart.

5 - Complicated Checkout Process

Luckily, platforms like Shopify naturally offer a streamlined checkout process, further enhanced by EliteCart's intuitive design.

Add incentives

There are many drivers of conversion, but let’s look at two of the biggest ones:

1 - Free Shipping

According to an invesp study, “9 out of 10 consumers say free shipping is the top most incentive to shop online more”. And 58% of consumers do indeed add more items to their shopping cart to get free shipping. EliteCart’s free shipping bar is perfect for this, because it not only informs but also encourages customers to add more items to their carts to qualify for free shipping. And it even allows you to show upsells that can help the customer to reach that threshold.

2 - Offers and Discounts

Did you know that almost no Shopify themes display all of the actual discounts in the cart? This is because themes typically don't display the "compare at" prices directly in the cart. "Compare At Prices show the original price of items that are currently discounted and typically show on product pages. But carts only show actual “Shopify Discounts”, not discounts coming from Compare At Prices.

Example

Let’s take an example: Imagine a customer is interested in purchasing a pair of sneakers originally priced at $200. Thanks to a seasonal sale, these sneakers are now available for only $80. On the product page, customers can see the "compare at" price of $300 next to the sale price of $80, clearly understanding the $120 savings they are about to make.

However, once the sneakers are added to the cart, the situation changes. The cart only displays the final sale price of $80, not the original "compare at" price of $200. As a result, the immediate visual reminder of the $120 savings is lost. This scenario can diminish the perceived value of the offer in the customer's eyes. They are aware of the discount but don't have the continuous visual reinforcement of the deal they are getting, which can be a crucial factor in the decision-making process and overall shopping satisfaction.

EliteCart's Solution

EliteCart changes this: You just have to tick a settings box, and EliteCart will show all the compare at prices, just like on your product page. On top of that, EliteCart will also calculate the savings your customer has made and display them to your customer, right above the Checkout button, massively increasing conversion due to an increase in perceived value.