The average rate of shopping cart abandonment, based on dozens of research studies, is 72%. That’s just a fearsome statistic. To make it more concrete, imagine you’re making $10,000 in online sales each month. According to that average abandonment rate, your $10,000 represents only 28% of the potential sales you could have had. Reducing the number of abandoned carts—even by 10% or 20%—would result in a notable uptick in sales.
Why do book buyers abandon their carts?
The following bar chart shows the top reasons that American consumers abandon their shopping carts.
There are a few key issues here that jumped out at us:
- Unexpected delivery costs
- Concerns over security
- Being forced to create an account
- Struggling with complicated checkout processes
When we designed the ReaderBound checkout process, we considered each of those four issues and how to combat them.
Problem #1: Being forced to create an account.
Some people just hate creating an account in order to buy things. They want to speed through the checkout and just get what they want. That’s why our publisher sites contain an “instant checkout” option. There, visitors have only to enter their email and name, and their shipping information.
ReaderBound sites always have an Instant Checkout option.
Problem #2: Struggling with a complicated checkout process.
Ugh! There’s nothing more annoying than having to fill out page after page of details in order to get a couple of books. Your customers are coming to your site to buy from you because they like you and want to support indie presses. That’s a precious thing and it deserves a single-page checkout … which is what all ReaderBound sites have. The image below shows a checkout page on the Coach House Books website.
Single-page checkout on a ReaderBound site.
Problem #3: Unexpected delivery costs.
Shipping presents one of the toughest challenges for indie presses because … Amazon. While you might not be able to match the “freeness” of much Amazon shipping, you can make it clear to your customers that you are doing everything you can to lessen shipping costs for them. You can avoid flat-rate fees, different shipping options at different price points, and more. It can also be a good idea to assume some of the shipping charge for the customer because the direct sale means you aren’t paying the bookstore for handling your books. If you do this, make it obvious that that’s what you’re doing; all consumers like to see a slashed price. Another possibility is offering free shipping for the purchase of more than one book.
If you can offer a discount on shipping, by all means, trumpet it. Arsenal Pulp Press offers free shipping on all orders over $50, supported by a homepage banner message. You could also put an alert message on every page of the site, or just the shopping cart.
It makes sense to play around with ways to lessen the sticker shock of shipping costs to see what works best, and ReaderBound makes it easy for publishers to experiment in this way.
Problem #4: Concerns over security
On ReaderBound, all transactions occur through major, advanced systems such as PayPal and Moneris. These systems are trusted by consumers, reliable, and safe, and ReaderBound checkouts advertise that security front-and-centre.
While no one solution completely eliminates the challenge of shopping cart abandonment, the trick is to reduce it as much as possible. Experiment with the variables on your site and on your checkout to see which ones have the greatest impact in reducing abandonment among your customers.