Understanding why visitors leave your website without completing a purchase can be difficult. While split testing and screen recordings offer some insights, direct feedback from customers at the point of departure would provide the most clarity on why they abandon carts at checkout.

If you already use live chat, you can get a lot of valuable insights by reviewing charts and looking for trends. From there, you can implement changes based on what you see directly mentioned by visitors.

At HelpFlow.com, we’ve run millions of chats over the past 6 years. Although our core service is to provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams to stores, a big part of the value we provide is distilling what we see in the chats into actionable improvements clients can make.

In this post, I will share common issues we see flagged by visitors in chats. These may spark ideas for you to improve on your site, or inspire you to dive deeper into your own chat transcripts to see inside the minds of your visitors.

Let’s get into it...

Why People Abandon Carts at Checkout: Addressing Search and Filter Confusion

If your store has more than a few products, you are probably already leveraging search functionality and filter style navigation.

We often see confusion with visitors on how to properly use navigation filters or even advanced search functionality.

Visitors often resort to visually scanning the page in search of what they need, but when they can’t find it, they tend to abandon carts at checkout.

By chatting with visitors as they search for products, we typically start to see patterns of the most important filters that visitors need that may be missing or not emphasized enough.

By seeing these patterns in chats, our clients are able to modify their search and filtering functionality to better align with what visitors need. This results in a much higher success rate for all visitors using the search and filters, not just the chat visitors we help.

Product Difference Confusion

If you have multiple products in a related category, sometimes it can be difficult for visitors to understand the difference. For example, we have a client that sells gaming headsets. They have around five different models priced between $100 and $500+ and visually they look the same.

 The client designed the category page to showcase the different specifications of the products, with the assumption of visitors would generally know why these differences matter.

Through chatting with visitors, we realized their use case for the headsets as they related to the specifications were much more relevant than the specifications themselves. For example, someone playing a high-intensity action game prefers the headset with very different specifications than someone playing a more thought-provoking long term strategy game.

We developed an internal conversation flow that chat agents used to make product recommendations. Over time, we perfected this product recommendation methodology and suggested that the client redesign the category page using insight from these chats. Such changes contributed to a significant reduction in abandon carts at checkout and a boost in sales.

Lack of Confidence

In some cases, visitors want to know precisely when the product is going to be delivered. Also, if you are in a competitive market, having a customer-focused easy return policy is important.

Although you may have this information communicated on the website, it’s likely that some visitors are not seeing it when they need to. By monitoring the types of chats that ask these questions along with where in the purchase flow the questions are asked, you can narrow down where you need to emphasize this information on the website.

This results in an overall conversion lift because visitors that would not have asked for this information on chat will see it clearly at precisely the time that they think of it.

Leverage Live Chat

You are probably already using live chat, and if you’re not you should be. By organizing the chats and periodically reviewing them, you can get a lot of insights you can use to improve the overall conversion of your site.

If you’re curious how a 24/7 live chat team can significantly decrease abandons while providing an awesome visitor experience, schedule a Strategy Call and I'll be happy to discuss.