If you manage an e-commerce site, you’ve probably noticed that too many users add items to their cart without completing the purchase. How to increase your conversion and engagement rates? Yu Centrik's targeted user research as well as volumes of publications on the topic point to 10 best design practices to reduce cart abandonment. We encourage you to adopt these best practices (PDF), while taking your specific business and user contexts into account.

1. François Courtois
Senior UX Designer
June 2014
10 DESIGN GUIDELINES
TO REDUCE CART
ABANDONMENT

2. OUR STORY
● Founded in Montréal 11 years ago
● Specialized in User Experience Design of products &
services
● Multidisciplinary team of obsessed experts
★ 10 000 hours of users interviews
★ 400 products or services designed
★ More than 500 happy clients

3. SOLE CANADIAN PARTNER OF UX ALLIANCE | IN 26 COUNTRIES

4. 68% OF SHOPPING CARTS HAVE
BEEN ABANDONED IN 2013.1

5. PRODUCT PAGE
Make information compelling at this key decision point. 1
70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout.2
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STRETCH T-SHIRT 34 reviews
70% of consumers read reviews of products before
buying.3
Provide a summary of consumer reviews.
Provide as many different
HD views as your customer
needs, including in use
photos and videos.
68% of consumers report using
YouTube to browse and research
retail companies.4
Indicate clearly:
● the price and discount
● the stock status
● the shipping costs and time
55% of consumers abandon carts due
to shipping costs.6
24% of consumers abandon carts when
the estimated delivery date is not
provided.6
Let customers buy when they are ready.
Cross-selling or Upselling?
Always propose alternative
choices.
Upselling is 20 times more effective
than cross-selling to increase the
average order size.5
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List
Customers visit business websites on their phones
on average 6 times during their purchase process.7
Click to zoom

6. NAVIGATION
Consider all the ways consumers find an item.
25% of consumers drop-off because navigation is too complicated.8
1
2
3
Give quick access to typical needs in
the top level category and make these
categories clickable.
Keep a simple hierarchy.
Avoid exceeding 3 category
levels.
AllSearch chair
Search suggestion
chair in All departments
chair in Home & Garden
chair in Sports & Outdoors
Office chair
Optimize your search engine for typical
search queries with autocompletion.
Give quick access to promotional contents
in the category.
(Special offers , seasonal trends, … )
SKIRTS
HOME / WOMAN / SKIRTS
OUR LOVELY SKIRTSUse clear page headings
Don’t forget breadcrumbs
Show customers where they are in the site:
NEW ARRIVALS CLOTHING
WOMEN
New arrivals
Outwear
Tops
Skirts & pants
BAGS
MEN
New arrivals
Shirt
Blazer
Sportswear
SALES
2

7. CALL TO ACTION
Minor changes, major lifts.19
For insound.com, by simply changing the button text from “Continue” to
“Review Order”, the conversion rate of the page increased by 8%.9
REGISTER
Name
Email
Get Free Access
Subscribe
Maintain consistent graphic
design throughout the site.
Indicate what
customers gain by
taking action.
Call to action Call to action Call to action
Call to action Call to action
Call to
action
Call to action
Avoid showing several “calls
to action” in the same page.
3

8. LOADING TIME
Consider your customer’s attention span.
57% of online consumers will abandon a website
after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load.10
In case processing is slow, use a visual
progress indicator to show progress.
Optimize third party
services.
Javascript
Credit card
authorization
Reduce the number of
pages in the checkout
process.
Mo
Reduce the number
of objects.
or
4

9. CUSTOMER SERVICE
Trust is hard to win and very easy to lose.
63% of online buyers look at the retailer’s return policy
before making a purchase.11
● Reward loyalty, e.g. Show your best customers that you care about them through Membership
Programs (CRM).
● Propose convenientservices, e.g. Free return policy.
● Optimize the speedof delivery, e.g. Store pickup within 2 hours .
Keep payment security information visible throughout the checkout process.
5

10. STORE LOCATOR
Let customers decide where to close the deal.
71% of consumers use a Store Locator to find a store.12
69% of consumers expect businesses to be within 5 miles.12
1. Store Name
1.54 km away from your location
(514) 906-8400
Mon - Fri: 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Sat: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sun: 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Go
Make the address and the
phone number clickable,
especially for mobile devices.
Indicate opening hours and
whether it’s currently open,
especially for mobile users.
Indicate the distance from the
customer’s location. On mobile devices, panning interferes
with scrolling. Therefore, provide a list
of stores ranked by the distance from
the customer rather than a map.
Enter a Location
Name, Street, City, State or Postal Code
or
Use current location
currently open
Address 1321 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1P7
Phone
Hours
6

11. CHECKOUT
Don’t interrupt the flow.
1 out of 4 customers abandon online purchases due to forced registration.13
E-Commerce website “nameon.no” increased its conversion rate by 11.40%
by simply removing all distractions during the checkout process.14
FLOW THEORY
➔ Don’t distract customers from the main goal.
➔ Enjoyment and the ability to focus lead customers
to perceive a process as useful and easy.
Use precise button labels.
Confirm your order Proceed
Use contextual error indications.
jdoe&gmail.com Use a valid email address
Add descriptions to form field labels
Password ? Use special characters for a more secure
password (i.e. #, $, %)
7

12. MULTI- CHANNEL
Consider all information hubs.
Let customers easily add items to their shopping cart or wishlist via desktop, smartphone or tablet.
Users starting their research on a smartphone finish their purchase:
1. in store
2. on a smartphone
3. on a computer 15
.
On smartphones, add local offers and information.
95% of smartphone users say they’ve searched for local information.
59% of those users visited a local business after searching.15
Get ahead of the tablet explosion: avoid Flash contents.
72% of tablet owners make purchases from their tablets on a weekly basis 15
.
TV
Friends and
family
Online
Store
Print
8

13. LANDING PAGES
State the value proposition clearly.
Answer why customers should buy from you when they could buy from the competition.
The Homepage receives 40% of all site entrances.16
Category pages can account for more than 50% of all pages viewed on an E-commerce
site 16
.
9

14. AFFILIATE PUBLISHERS
Work with affiliate publishers to re-engage your customer.
36% of shoppers who abandon their cart did it because they
found a better price elsewhere.17
Affiliate publishers are third-party groups that send potential customers to your website
for a cut of the sale:
● Coupons and offers (RetailMeNot, CouponCabin)
● Loyalty and rewards (Ebates, QuidCo)
● Social Shopping (Kaboodle, ShopStyle)
● Comparison Shopping (PriceGrabber, ShopWiki)
➔ Set your goals and choose your affiliate publishers.
➔ Make a distribution plan.
➔ See who’s driving sales then make changes accordingly.
10

15. Only 20% of Fortune 500 merchants
have strategies to re-engage 18

16. info@yucentrik.ca
Share these best practices with your colleagues!
We’d love to hear about your conversion results too.
Get in touch with our research and usability experts.
1-514-523-5862
@yucentrik
yucentrik.ca
uxstaff.com
yulab.ca

17. 1. 27 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics - Baymard Institute - 2014
2. Forrester Research - 2012
3. Buy it, Try it, Rate it a survey conducted by Weber Shandwick in
2012
4. Google/Shopper Sciences, ZMOT Purchase Path Studies, U.S.,
April 2012
5. Predictive Intent - 2012
6. Comscore - 2012
7. Beyond and Lexis Research 2012
8. Sign Up for Free Basic Account - Statista - 2014
9. Optimizely - 2012
10. PhoCusWright Inc. on behalf of Akamai - 2010
11. Comscore - 2012
12. Google/Nielsen Mobile Path to Purchase custom study, Nov
2013.
13. User Interface Engineering
14. Wingify - 2012
15. Google, The Mobile Playbook, 2012
16. Screen Pages - 2013
17. WorldPay - 2012
18. Webtrends - 2012
19. “Minor Changes, Major Lifts” (Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing
Director and CEO, MECLABS, and Paul Cheney, Editorial Analyst,
MECLABS)
END NOTES

18. Thank you!
Joelle Stemp
President
jstemp@yucentrik.ca
ca.linkedin.com/in/jstemp
www.yucentrik.ca
+1 514 523-5862