How some specialty retailers learned to cut their cart abandonment rate

One hard lesson by several specialty online retailers: If you want your shoppers to proceed to a sale instead of abandoning their cart, avoid overloading the shopping cart with features, MorePro Marketing Inc. CEO Scott Charters tells InternetRetailer.com.

Charters, who caters to small niche online retailers, says clients have experienced a doubling of conversion rates by cutting excessive information from their sites, making it easier to find information on products and services. Niche retailers sometimes tend to go overboard on trying to explain their goods, he says.

One of the most troublesome areas, however, is when retailers force shoppers to get information on shipping times and costs by first entering the checkout process. And that can create cart abandonment rates of over 50%, he says.

"A lot of carts were abandoned not because the shoppers didn’t want to buy something, but because they were just looking for shipping information," he says. But overall conversion rates rise, while cart abandonment rates decline, when retailers present shipping information along with product displays, letting shoppers know up front a product’s total cost, he adds.

"Consumers don’t want to have to work to get their information," Charters says.