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Optimizing Magento Cart And Checkout: What Do You Need To Know?

by Charlie Ly

Magento Cart has become a more and more important factor that impacts directly eCommerce business sales.

With the development in E-commerce in recent years and a drastic increase in e-commerce in 2020 due to the pandemic, we will see the world shifting to shopping online as their primary shopping method. According to eMarketer, we are looking at $ 859.28 billion of eCommerce sales in the US market by 2022.

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As an eCommerce store owner, you want to capture your customers from the vast pool of online shoppers, and stop them from going to new competitors in the market. This is why it’s essential to minimize cart abandonment because it’s the deciding step if your customer would get through with the payment or not.

However, there are numerous reasons for cart abandonment that has nothing to do with the products you sell, but the Magento cart process itself. From the statistics of the percentage reasons for abandoned carts based on Baymard’s statistics, the major causing issues are listed below:

  • High extra costs (for example, shipping) – 53%
  • The requirement to register an account – 31%
  • Too long and complicated checkout process – 23%
  • Errors and crashes on an eCommerce website – 22%
  • Impossibility to see the total cost of order up-front – 20%
  • The sensitivity of payment information – 17%
  • Slow delivery – 16%
  • Unsatisfactory returns policy – 10%
  • Not enough payment methods – 6%
  • Declined credit card – 4%

What prevents online shoppers from a purchase?

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We will focus on the three issues that most buyers encounter with Magento cart, then reveal some tips for other reasons in later sections.

If you don’t find your solution in this article, then you can research further in:

LOSING customers? OPEN SECRETS to minimize Magento 2 abandoned cart and SAVE your site!

High extra costs (for example, shipping)

One of the first and foremost reasons customers were chased away from you is the hidden cost of waiting to smother them at every turn. The one thing distinct from online purchases from in-store shopping is the shipping cost. While it’s perfectly reasonable for you to charge them due to the storage and delivery expenses, customers still prefer more when they get the product without the Tax or Shipping extra fees tag along.

Requiring to registering accounts

Another thing that makes customers annoyed with the adding to cart process is the registration prompt. 3 out of 10 online shoppers give up on a site because it makes them ‘log in to checkout’, which is ineffective and puts potential buyers under the impression of being coerced.

In this situation, you should set account registration as optional, so if customers like your products, they’re going to sign up on their own.

Long & Complicated Checkout process – mini cart

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The process of adding to the Magento cart would not bring satisfaction if a long & complicated checkout followed it. The poor user interface could also contribute to the reason for buyers to say no with your cart.

Your Magento 2 mini cart can also be unattractive to your prospective customers by default. The process of adding to the cart has a slow and lagging feeling to it.

If you’re planning to up your game, then we will feature a list of Magento 2 mini cart extensions below to polish your mini cart in style, design, and responsiveness.

GET MORE Magento mini cart extensions and CONVERT customers with sleek modern styles!

That alone might have been an issue, but combine it with the slow performance your site might have, and any slow or unresponsiveness of the checkout interactions. You have a designated bomb waiting to explode and kill your conversion rate.

Window shopping

According to Truelist, around 40% of people who put items in carts don’t have the intention of buying, they simply compare the price with other retailers or browse to see if the products they search are on display or not.

Also, among the three devices (phones, tablets, and desktops), desktops are the most reliable with the abandonment cart only at 73%, while the other two devices are at 85.65% and 80.4%, respectively.

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Other reasons

  • Payment problems

There are a lot of stores applying only one payment method that they are familiar with and trust, but it does not mean your customers are. Customers often place their preferred payment options at higher priority when giving the purchasing decision. 

Moreover, hidden fees appearing on the payment process also makes customer leave the purchase. This is a lack of transparency that nobody wants to see. It also impacts the customer’s trust in your business. 

  • Trust issues

It relates to your business’s reputation or guarantees of payment, product return policies, and money-back guarantees. Customers will read carefully which benefits and the rights they get if they add product to cart. 

Then, when adding a list of similar products to the cart, customers have a habit of comparing prices, policies among the suppliers. If your policy is not clear or less competitive than other competitors, the abandoned cart rate is high. 

  • Website security

Nearly 1.4 million people in the United States reported being victims of identity theft in 2020. It’s no surprise that modern buyers are concerned about their privacy when shopping online because sensitive information like credit card numbers and home addresses is submitted through an online checkout.

People abandon their online shopping carts in 17 percent of cases because they don’t trust the site with their credit card information and low security. 

Magento Cart and Checkout Best Practices for Better Conversions

Given the reasons customers abandon carts, there are some tips that you can do to capture customers in the Magento cart process.

HACK your sales WITH EASE by utilizing these Magento shopping cart extension!

Optimize user interface & clarifies extra charges

The first thing customers look at when they begin the add to cart process is the design. When customizing your Magento cart, you should keep in mind that the user interface should bring out modern and security impressions. You can consider the Magento 2 ajaxcart extension for high performance and responsiveness, which is often interpreted as high security and excellent service in customers’ minds.

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Using Abandoned Cart Automated Emails

People do take at least a glance at abandoned cart emails, even when most are commercial purposes. Statistics said that up to 48% of abandoned cart automated emails are opened, and 21% of received abandoned carts are clicked on, with 10.7% of them leading to shopping cart recovery. Emails are useful for Magento cart if you can have an appealing design, and using A/B testing might also help you get better results by testing the designs and content options and find what’s right for your audience.

Timing when sending an abandoned cart email also plays an essential role in your success. You should send them within the first couple of hours when the Magento cart left behind was still fresh in their minds. But don’t send them in too soon, or it will come right off as intrusive.

Offer Free Shipping

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93% of people were tempted to buy more products when they see it as “Free Shipping”, as they’re not afraid of high charges when their items are delivered. So it’s a proven tactic to either set free shipping for products at a certain price threshold or put a reasonable shipping charge that doesn’t dent customer’s pocket too much that they don’t want to pay.

Allow Guest Checkout in the Checkout page

A Magento guest checkout right out of the box when visitors go to the checkout page is a relief and encourages them to place orders quickly and conveniently. But still, there must be a login option. You should remind your customer of the perks in having accounts, more accessible saving carts, favorite products, review order history, reward programs, and future promotion so that they find interested in registering for themselves.

Magento cart price rules

More than free shipping, every customer is excited to buy more products when they have a discount or coupon code, and using Magento shopping cart price rules is an effective way to lure your visitors in for purchases. There are several tactics you can apply in a promotional campaign created by Magento cart price rules:

  • Free coupon
  • Free shipping
  • Buy X product and get Y product for free or with a discount
  • A discount with minimum purchase

However, going overboard with discounts and promotions could bring loss to your business. You can create surprise promotions to celebrate a festive occasion, seasonal discounts, or aim at different customer groups to reduce recipients’ size, but still make customers feel special.

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DON’T MISS IT! You’re just 5  steps away from mastering Magento 2 cart price rules!

Quick support & Easy Return

The unsatisfactory returning policy accounted for 10% of the customers that abandoned their carts. Your buyers also want to have support round-the-clock, both during and after the Magento add to cart process. You should have the return and support policy that’s convenient for your buyer. This way, they will be more likely to buy your products than abandon their carts.

With the easy return policy, customers will understand that you tailored their purchasing experience carefully and are oriented to work with them in the long term. One happy customer will give recommendations to another, and word-of-mouth promotion does the job for you without much effort.

Simple speed up Magento Cart tips

As I have mentioned above, even when you have all the beautiful designs and features to attract buyers, it would still be a significant disadvantage if your Magento cart performance is behind. Working on a site where the add to cart process was slow and lagging not only lower customer satisfaction and increase abandoned carts, but it also hurts your Google ranking. Google will prioritize other competitors who have better performance over you on the search results page.

Below we’ve listed some of the general practices that don’t require much technical knowledge to optimize your Magento cart.

And if you want to read the tips in further detail, also explore further tricks that will fix your Magento 2 cart being slow, then:

GATHER NOW all tricks to troubleshoot Magento 2 add to cart slow UNDER your fingertips!

Find which part is causing the bottleneck using Magento Profiler

If you want to fix your Magento cart speed issues, then you must first find out what is causing your cart to be behind in speed. The easiest thing you could check first is your Magento hosting and infrastructure. Either your hosting was not upgraded, or hardware wasn’t up to required could affect your performance, since the infrastructure is the foundation of what you can expect from your store.

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If your hardware is already powerful, then the next step is to set up a clone Magento store and test the performance of that one compared to your real store. See if there is any problem with the server configuration or other bottlenecks that need fixing.

At this stage, it depends on your business’s strategies and criteria that you want to perform tests on; you can also test directly on the product environment. In case your test store runs fine, then you should look further into the codes.

To check up on the underlying errors in your database, third-party extensions, some rogue scripts, or any content, you need to turn on the Magento Profiler. Magento profiler is off by default, and you can turn on it by state the following statement using the .htaccess file:

SetEnv MAGE_PROFILER <type>

The <type> can be “csvfile” or “firebug” or “html”.

In the case of “csvfile”, you can find the report in var/log/ dir.

The second way you can enable the profiler is through using CLI. Run the following command:

php bin/magento dev:profiler:enable <type>

where, <type> can be “html” or “csvfile” or “flagfile”.

In the case of “flagfile”, a flagfile named as profiler.flag will be created inside var/ directory.

Note: If you don’t state the <type> and runs the command, the system will put “html” by default.

The tip for working with the load table is that you can sort by time and inspect the large values in the Time and Cnt column.

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Disable unnecessary carriers

Unnecessary carriers are redundant as they consume time; the system will have to send in a request for the carrier and wait for it to respond. Which means customers will be frustrated by having to wait longer.

Removing the carriers you no longer work with will free up the database, and allow your Magento cart process to be 1 – 2 seconds faster without entering any code. You can get rid of the carriers you don’t need in the backend under Store > Configuration > Sale > Shipping Method.

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Remove unused Magento carts rules

Sure discounts, promo code, and other types of price rules are the perfect bait for your customers to consume more. However, a considerable amount of cart price rules will start to cause deductions in the cart’s speed, and you will end up with a slow-performing Magento cart.

You can lighten the load by deleting some of the cart price rules you do not use, such as a one-time occurring event.

To remove a cart price rule, go to Marketing > Cart Price Rules, click on the price rule from the grid, and click Delete in the cart price rule edit page.

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Best 7 Magento 2 extensions to optimize Magento Cart – Maximize conversion rate!

Online shoppers are attracted by fancy popups, neat window sections, and smooth effects, and while not by much, it does affect their purchasing decisions. They will put their money in a site that gives them a sense of security and good quality, which all the above did the trick. We will list below the extensions that will polish and optimize your Magento Cart and level up your game!

Magento 2 Ajax Add to cart by BSS Commerce

First, we need to understand what Ajax is and how Magento 2 ajax cart can help your site in both the performance and design interface.

You have encountered Ajax applications on social websites like Facebook and Twitter, with their likes and upvote system. Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is an approach that, with it, websites don’t have to reload each time there is a new change in the site interface. It is doing this by adding an Ajax engine as an intermediary between users and the webserver.

When users sent in HTTP requests in the form of Javascript calls to Ajax engine, it handles the validation of data, editing the data in the memory on its own. If it needs anything from the web server, it will send in XML to be processed, without stalling the user experience.

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This significantly boosts the website’s performance because web visitors no longer have to wait around for the webserver to respond and reload.

DON’T WAIT to know the benefits of Magento 2 Ajax Cart, or it will be TOO LATE to capture customers’ interest!

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With the information provided above about Ajax technology, Magento 2 Ajax cart by BSSCommerce brings Magento cart a smooth and faster performance to your online store. And even when the performance doesn’t speed up to expectation, you can still camouflage the speed with a stunning pop-up design.

The vital feature of Magento 2 Ajax cart that will soar up your sales, however, is the cross-sell and up-sell included in the Magento 2 add-to-cart pop-ups. When customers have already had a good experience during adding to the cart process, they will likely be open to buying more products. The up-sell and cross-sell product is the perfect strategy to persuade them before they change their minds.

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Quick cart by Weltpixel

While your customers will be hanging around for a long time, the same story couldn’t be said with your guest visitors. You have one chance to impress them, and what’s better than a window slide-out Magento 2 mini cart style?

The Magento Quick Cart extension level up your mini-cart with responsive design and interesting features. It provides you with a slide-out window mini cart whenever a customer put their products in the cart. You can add a custom message in the mini cart to inform your customer of any promotion or any important news you wish to deliver.

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Mini Cart by Compactcode

Magento 2 Mini Cart by Compactcode is operating similar to the Quick Cart extension of Weltpixel. It offers a mini cart sidebar with custom styling so you can change the design and add in more features that would benefit customers in adding to cart process.

One difference between the Mini Cart extension and other competitors is, it includes the sticky mini cart, a mini icon that follows customers as they scroll down the page. It enables customers the ability to access the mini cart at any time, and saves them time scrolling up to the top of the page.

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Abandoned Cart Email by Aheadworks

When customers left a cart, it’s not the end of your relationship with them. You can still persuade them to reconsider their abandoned cart by sending them an abandoned cart email. A well-timing and designed abandoned cart email can impact buyers’ purchasing decisions, with statistically 10% of the abandoned carts getting recovered.

Abandoned Cart Email by Aheadworks allows you to customize your message, time sending emails, and multiple audiences that you want to target. You can send a test email to see how the design and all other elements work before launching the actual campaign.

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There are also email logs so you can monitor your emails’ status and have suitable actions depending on each situation.

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Create powerful emails, schedule them at the right time, and check the logs to ensure your abandoned carts return.

Shopping Cart Price Rule per Store View by BSS Commerce

As I have mentioned before, discounts and promotion coupons have always been a hook to lure customers in for more products or to log in and receive future rewards. But when you are an international business, there could be a situation where a celebration in one region would not be celebrated in others, for example, Luna New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, etc. Sadly, Magento by default only lets you set the price rule for the whole website.

Shopping Cart Price Rule per Store View breaks that limit and allows you to set the cart price rule for each store view and control your promotion in the local market. You can also offer a special promotion for multiple store views at once, hence, expanding your influence on customers’ purchasing decisions.

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Save Cart Extension by CMSmart

Not all customers can remember what they want to purchase but haven’t had the opportunity to do so in their previous visit. Quickly save your cart and easily check them in your account when you next swing by with Save Cart extension by CMSmart. The extension does give you the ability to restore your cart, save multiple Magento Cart, share them through emails, and more exciting features that would add convenience to customers adding to cart journey.

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Add multiple products to cart by BSS Commerce

Performance is an issue when adding a product to cart, but adding multiple products one by one is a tedious process and painful for customers. If this problem remains unresolved, you might lose some potential sales because your buyers will decide not to buy as many as they intended to save time.

Some of the key features of Add Multiple Products to Cart by BSSCommerce include allowing customers to choose multiple products at once and add them to cart using checkboxes. Besides, the extension also shows the added products in an Ajax pop-up, which would also give visitors the impression of a sleek and fast-performing website, and boost up your sales.

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Final Words

Though each eCommerce store is unique and hopes to offer quality products to customers, not much care was taken into consideration when it comes to Magento cart. They have been paid attention to the smooth checkout process and forget that if customers don’t go through the cart, they won’t be at the checkout phase at all. Above is the list of tips and extensions we hope will help you achieve the end goal of reducing the cart abandonment rate, and if you have any inquiries regarding the Magento cart, feel free to ask us anytime.

BSS Commerce is one of the leading Magento extension providers and web development services globally. With experienced and certified Magento developers, we commit to bringing high-quality products and services to optimize your business effectively. Furthermore, we offer FREE Installation – FREE 1-year Support and FREE Lifetime Update for every Magento extension.

CONTACT NOW to let us know your problems. We are willing to support you every time.

 

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