HOW MONITORING EXIT PAGE RATES CAN GUARANTEE LOWER CART ABANDONMENT RATES

I'm sure all eCommerce businesses have had it happen to them. A customer visits their webpage, they add items to their shopping cart, and they just leave it there. They view their shopping cart, they start the checking out process, but they never press the purchase button. Instead, they exit your website.

The best e-commerce websites create an online experience that makes visitors fall in love with their products. 

But once they get to the checkout, something just doesn’t feel right. There’s a break in the experience from cart to checkout, and it causes a disconnect for the customer. It’s this disconnect that leads to the highest level of cart abandonment at the very first step of the checkout.

This baffles most companies because of course they had to have want the product to add it to their shopping carts. Right? Well what happened? Did they see the grand total and chicken out instantly... or was it after shipping was added in? Did they find it cheaper on a competitor's website? Did they do the unthinkable and go in-stores to buy the product?

These things, we don't know. But now, we are finally capable of finally being able to put a few pieces of the puzzle together. Well, that is, thanks to being able to analyze exit rates.  “Exit % is the percentage of site exits that occurred from a specified page or set of pages.”  More simply, it’s the page on your site that the visitor left from.

 According to Baymard Institute, a web research company in the UK, 67.45% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Think about that. For every 100 potential customers, 67 of them will leave without purchasing. 

But why are they leaving and how can monitoring Exit Rate Percentages stop them. The most common reasons that consumers leave are as follows:

Since that part of the puzzle has been somewhat resolved, we must now identify which reason probably prompted your customers to walk away. This is where Exit Page Rates come in. 

Just by analyzing the amount of consumers who exit from various cart pages daily, your company will be able compare the contents of the page to the reasons shown above. If you’re looking to convert more visitors in buyers, you need to know how they navigate your site.  You can use Exit% to help you pinpoint areas on your website in which visitors leave, before converting. For example, while know that most customers exit right before purchasing. Did you have a lot of consumers exit after taxes or shipping was added in? If they did, why not look into adding free for consumers spending over a specific amount?

Or was it because the process was taking too long. Well why not add in a one-click check out button like Amazon did?

Amazon has probably made billions off of their one-click shopping button. It’s so easy to just click and buy without even deliberating over the pros and cons of the purchase.

You can steal a page from Amazon’s playbook by creating your own easy-to-buy shopping cart process. It won’t work for unregistered customers, of course, but it can work for members.

Some other common Exit Pages are the Contact Page, because consumers probably opted for giving you guys a call or utilizing the listed address to convert another way. instead. However, if you find that your products or services pages have a high Exit%, you’re probably losing revenue! If they are leaving from your the product or services pages, you should probably consider comparing your prices to your competitors to make sure you aren't charging too much, making sure the product images are visually appealing and that the content displayed is error free and easy to understand. 

Now that you understand the importance of Exit Page Rates and how it can aid in your war against cart abandoment. I hope you will start paying more attention to yours, making adjustments, and seeing how it affects the amount of conversions you are able to secure. 

References:

Floyd, Steve. (N.D). Google Analytics: What is Exit Percentage and Why Should You Care. AXZM. https://www.axzm.com/google-analytics-exit-percentage/ 

Patel, Neil. (N.D)  30 Must-Use Methods for Killing Shopping Cart Abandonment.  Kissmetrics. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/methods-for-killing-shopping-cart-abandonment/

Sheth, Nirav. (N.D.) Why Most Online Shoppers Don’t Make it Past the First Step of Checkout. Kissmetrics. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/first-step-of-checkout/ 

Unknown. (2013 Aug.6) Why Online Retailers Are Losing 67.45% of Sales and What to Do About It. Shopify. https://www.shopify.com/blog/8484093-why-online-retailers-are-losing-67-45-of-sales-and-what-to-do-about-it