Can’t stop losing clients from your e-commerce? The reasons why and 6 possible solutions

Abigail Bosze

Content Writer

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I can’t stop losing clients”.
If you identify with this sentence, find 10 minutes of time in your life to read this post carefully.
Today we are going to talk about one of the biggest problems that many online shops have: they get a lot of traffic, but users leave without making a purchase.
What could be happening?
We are going to explain the 6 most common reasons why you are losing clients and how you can solve them.
Let’s get to work!

Table of Contents

Why you are losing clients and what to do to avoid it
6. Do you lose clients? Check your product cards
Are you ready to stop losing clients?

Why you are losing clients and what to do to avoid it

Every shop is a different case, but here you have the six most common mistakes within the e-commerce world. These may well be the reasons why your clients are leaving without buying.
1. Your website is way too slow
You have invested a big chunk of your budget into directing clients to your online shop through:

However, when users are about to click on the product card and buy it, your website doesn’t load.
The result?

You lose the client and your Return on Investment or ROI drops a few points.

We are part of a society of immediacy, tweets, and urgency. We gobble up content in small doses and we can’t wait even 4 seconds to find out what a website has to offer.
If your website is slow, all the effort you made to attract clients will be worthless.
In order to check your website’s performance you can use these three tools:

Anything over 2 seconds is a major speed problem. You need to optimize your website’s performance before redirecting more traffic its way.
Look at the advice on the PageSpeed website. In general, just by optimizing your image sizes and by using a cache plugin, performance will improve.
If you want to go a step further, you can start thinking of minifying your CSS and gzip compression. However, if you are just starting out, what we mentioned above is more than enough.

2. Your website is beautiful, but users don’t know where to click

As a general rule, unless you have a design business or your niche requires excellent visual appearance…

Always put user experience ahead of design.

Look at Amazon—its design would make any web designer cringe. However, it is the best-selling e-commerce in the whole world.
Navigation through products must not only be intuitive and fast, but the whole website must be optimized for conversion.
We wrote a specific post on what user experience is and how you can improve it. If this is a new concept for you, this post is a good way to start.
Let’s read about a few important measures to take:

Navigability: Check whether your website architecture is easy to follow (especially if you have a lot of products) and if the menus really help clients move easily around the website.
Search engine: It’s quick and efficient for the client. Having a search engine like Doofinder in your online shop will help users easily find what they are looking for.
Design: You have already seen that there is no need for frivolous things. Check out this other post about what the ideal design for an e-commerce is.

A good exercise to check your e-commerce user experience is to ask someone who has never visited your website to find a specific product.
Focus on any doubts that they may have throughout the process and all those moments where they got lost while navigating. Those are the hot points that you need to solve.

3. Hold the reins

Let’s now talk about another concept that is also related to the navigability that we mentioned before.
Although users will surf websites as they please, that doesn’t mean that we can’t act as a compass to avoid them becoming distracted.
The first thing you need to know is which pages or product cards you want to direct them to.
We can get that information from a conversion analysis.
Imagine that out of 10,000 visits, 100 ended up making a purchase. After analyzing the users’ behavior before the purchase, you find out that 70 watched a video and 85 visited two specific pages.
There you have a possible pattern. Highlight that video and make users visit those two pages (prioritize navigability to the pages that purchasers visit the most).
How can you do that?
Use a menu item such as “if this is your first visit, click here”, and from there you can guide them to where you want them to go.
Another important point is that once you have analyzed the conversion history, you may learn about other common characteristics that can help you define the segmentation of your advertising campaigns better.
For example, “on Saturday afternoons, there are more men aged between 20 and 30 who buy”.
Well, now you know to whom you should direct your campaign that day.
Related post: Web analytics for e-commerce: which metrics do you need to monitor if your business is doing well?

4. They can’t “try” the product

A strategy as old as business itself is offering a sample to the potential buyer.
Surely you have been offered to taste some strawberries by your local fruit seller—which you then ended up buying.
Let’s see what options you have to do something in that vein.

A. Using a lead magnet as a sample

A lead magnet is a gift that we offer to our audience in exchange for their email address. In addition to gaining subscribers, we can use it to offer a small sample of your products.
For example, if you sell beauty products, you can create a PDF document including some videos about “how to use makeup to look perfect in just 9 minutes”.
These videos will allow clients to see what your products’ benefits really are and the result they may have if they buy it.
Don’t hesitate, video marketing will help you sell more.

B. Free shipping

Another way of solving this problem is by offering free shipping.
Indeed, it is an expense, but your orders will increase. Clients will dare to order products more when they know that they won’t spend a cent if they don’t like it.
Try it for a while and analyze the ROI that this strategy is giving you even if you have to pay for shipping costs. In the end, the important part is the profitability that you get.
5. Clients abandon their cart
In every online shop there is a percentage of users that back out right at the end. This is what we call “abandoned cart rate”.
Reasons?

Unexpected shipping costs or taxes.
An interruption.
A problem with their credit card.
A complex checkout process.
A last minute doubt.

There can be a million causes for why purchases are left incomplete. It is inevitable. Let’s see how we can solve that.

A. Abandoned cart recovery system

Yes, they left at the last minute, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t contact them again. You have the option of sending them a chain of automatic emails in order to solve their possible doubts and get that sale.
Tip: an effective strategy is to establish a two-step check out. You ask for their email address and name in the first one.
And then, in the second step, the rest of the details.
This way, we get their names and email addresses before and we can include them in the abandoned cart recovery system.
Do you want to read more about this marketing strategy?
You can find a lot of information in our email marketing guide for e-commerce and in this other post about how to create an autoresponder.

B. Remarketing

In any online advertisement platform, we also have the option of creating remarketing campaigns.
Surely, you have seen that after having visited a shop, you get ads about the products that you were looking at. This is a type of remarketing.
A good way of starting to use remarketing is with your main products. Try different ways and analyze what works better for you, and then try with different products.
It is a great option to re-cast that hook again and avoid losing clients.

6. Do you lose clients? Check your product cards

The quantity of online shops that don’t focus on this is unbelievable, even when it is a key factor to not lose clients.
Here you have the factors that you should revise.

Pictures: they need to be high-quality and you need to show the products from all angles. You need users to be able to see the products perfectly.
Videos: again, with a video, users will be able to see the product working and understand its benefits better.
Prices and shipping costs: as you already know, this normally means abandoned carts. Clearly state the final price (with all shipping costs and fees included). NO SURPRISES!
Description: if you have a shop based on dropshipping and you don’t modify the supplier’s texts, you will not only lose sales, but Google will also punish you for having duplicate content. Use good copywriting in order to express the all the benefits of what you sell.

Not being careful with your product cards is the same as having a shop with no attendant to help clients.
Don’t become your own worst enemy.

Are you ready to stop losing clients?

We often become obsessed with getting more and more clients and we don’t realize that we are losing the ones that we already had.
Optimize your online shop to achieve a great conversion rate, and then you can worry about increasing traffic.
Anything else just means that you are decreasing profitability.