You may get wrapped up in a lot of elements that have to do with your website – maintenance, link building, keyword optimization and email marketing are just a few examples. Unfortunately, many people who run e-commerce websites forget about the impact that shopping has, and what happens whenever someone doesn’t purchase an item. While some analytics programs will shed greater light on this, many webmasters go from day to day without the knowledge of how many items were added to their virtual shopping carts but never purchased. The reasons behind this are numerous and not all are avoidable, but bringing these shoppers back into the fold is a must for those seeking to expand business. We’ll discuss below how you can accomplish that through a variety of tricks known to boost return visits and sales.

Always Be Open

The biggest single reason that customers add items to your shopping cart and then do not follow through with the purchase is due to transparency (namely, hidden costs). When it comes to tax and shipping charges, many people feel that if they hide the costs until the very end, the customer will pony up the dough regardless. Unfortunately, hidden costs are the number one reason why people leave shopping carts full and don’t check out. If you want to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts you have in your store, then you must begin to disclose your shipping charges and any other fees upfront. Without doing this, your rate of abandonment will be very unlikely to decrease in the near future.

Always Save Carts

Did you know that you can easily ensure that any and all shopping carts for a user are maintained from now until the next time they visit? Furthermore, did you know that the vast majority of your shoppers do not make a purchase on their first visit? With these elements acknowledged, it comes as no surprise that pinging users with their old shopping carts may be the best way to boost business among repeat visitors. For those who are wanting to ensure carts are saved until next time, we recommend that you look further into persistent and perpetual shopping cart solutions. Once these solutions have been implemented, you can then expect the rate of shopping cart abandonment to decrease.

Reconnect to Lost Souls

Anyone who has created a user account for shopping with your brand should have had to provide a valid email address – it’s time to put those to good use! You can start pinging users with emails, promising them huge discounts if they return and finish their previous orders. The data suggests that one of out every three people who open your cart emails will make a purchase – how can we maximize open rates? We recommend using a combination of images and action verbs to motivate users into engaging further with your emails, but that is just the beginning. You may have to send out multiple cart emails over time in order to recover the maximum number of people. At the end of the day, though, you shouldn’t expect to recruit all – or even a majority – of these lost souls into purchasing their cart contents.