How to Avoid Cart Abandonment (By Lowering Shipping Costs!)

There’s nothing more frustrating than a customer leaving at the checkout. Lower shipping costs is a great way to avoid this.

When you have an online store, you want your customers to visit your website, browse your products, and ultimately make a purchase. It’s heartbreaking when customers get as far as the checkout and then suddenly disappear without completing their purchase.

There could be many reasons causing this scenario: It could be that your site’s loading speed is too slow, the checkout process is too complex, or that your customers simply found a better price on one of your competitor’s sites.

However, recent studies have shown that out of all the possible reasons, the number one factor causing cart abandonment is unexpected shipping costs.

There are many ways to lower shipping costs, making your products more affordable and attractive to potential buyers.

How to Lower Shipping Costs (and Make More Sales!)

First, you should thoroughly research your shipping options. Remember that your shipping price is a lot more than just a few extra dollars.

For many of your potential customers, its what makes the difference between choosing to buy from you or from someone else. So, exploring different couriers and shipping companies can help lower your costs. You might choose a slower delivery for a better price, or change the packaging you use to reduce the overall package weight.

If you’ve done all of the above and still can’t reduce your shipping costs, here are some alternative tactics:

Offer Free Shipping

Naturally, the idea sounds frightening at first, but think of how much money you spend on marketing.

Free domestic shipping doesn’t cost you much, however, if publicized properly it can be a major lead generator. Let everyone in the world know that you’re offering free shipping, and you will most definitely see an increase in orders.

That being said, you should check your margins to make sure you aren’t cutting into your profits.

Offer Flat Rates

Another way to tackle high shipping costs is to calculate the average cost per order, and then create a general shopping rule that applies the same shipping cost to all orders, regardless of their size, distance etc.

This way you can include the shipping price inside the product price, making the checkout process easier and quicker.

The major disadvantage to using flat rate shipping is that to some customers, such as locals or people who’ve purchased your smaller items, shipping might still be too expensive, while larger or further away orders will become cheaper.

Setup a Shipping Calculator

Shipping prices tend to change from time to time, so if you want to be transparent with your customers, you can set up a real-time shipping quote calculator that takes information such as package weight, distance, and the customer’s preferred courier.

This shipping calculator can also output a specified shipping price relevant for the day of purchase.

Seeing all the data as-is will add to your reliability. However, that still doesn’t ensure that you’ll get more orders, plus getting such a feature up and running with no glitches can cost quite a bit to set up.

Useful Magento Extensions

If you’re serious about lowering your shipping costs, there are also extensions that can help make the process easier.

Shipping Restriction

The Shipping Restrictions Extension for Magento 2 is a way to set shipping restrictions for each individual product by zip code, state, or country.

It’s easy to create a list of banned locations where products cannot be delivered.

This saves customers the headache of ordering a product only to find out it can’t be delivered to where they are.

Admin can easily make specific shipping restrictions for each product in their online store.

When a product with a shipping restriction is added to a cart, the customer receives a notification in the shopping cart as well as the checkout screen explaining the restriction. They cannot checkout until they remove those products from the cart.

Free Gift Discounts

The Free Gift Discount Extension for Magento 2 is a way to let store admin define free gift products that will be added to the cart when a product matches a cart price rule.

This extension improves sales and customer satisfaction by adding shopping cart rules that provide customers with free gifts during purchase. A product must be added to the cart for this promotion to work.

When a product is added to the cart, the additional free gift is added to fulfil the promotion. A message will show on the screen to confirm the additional free gift in the cart.

The admin has the ability to customize the labels for the free gift as well, adding a written message in any language

In addition to a free gift in the cart, this extension lets the admin set up other free product rules. A customer discount can be added when a defined shopping cart rule is completed. This percentage can be defined in the “Discount Amount” custom field in the backend.

It’s also possible to include multiple free gifts, by adding the product SKU and using commas to separate them. The same SKU can be used for multiple copies of the same free gift as well.

Conclusion

Making product sales is important for business success. A good way to get more sales is by lowering shipping costs. This is made possible with discounts and free gifts to the customers.

Another way is by creating shipping restrictions to countries or areas which would have high shipping rates or difficulty delivering, which drive sup shipping costs. Restricting where products can be shipped saves money in the long term.

One way to prevent abandoned carts and get more sales is by offering free gifts to customers. This can be a buy 1, get 2 free situation, where a product is added to the cart and another is added immediately.

Offering your customers free gifts is also a great way to ensure that they will not abandon the cart and fully complete the sale.