Welcome to what is another very exciting part of the course, because we're now going to look at how
to boost your sales and take your business to the moon.
And what I'm going to show you here in the upcoming lectures, are a series of tips and tricks that
can make an enormous difference with just a very small investment.
And we're going to kick things off by talking about abandoned carts and checkouts.
But first of all, what are they?
What is an abandoned cart and checkout?
Well, I have no doubt that you're familiar with what I'm talking about, but just to be clear, I'm
over here on my site and as you can see, I'm at the cart and it's at this point, for whatever reason,
I decide to not go any further.
I abandoned the cart, I leave the site, or perhaps I get a little bit further in my journey.
I actually end up adding this to the checkout, and either I leave here, or perhaps I put in my contact
details and my shipping address, but I never pay.
I abandon the checkout.
So clearly that's a lost opportunity, which is a great shame.
But maybe you don't realize what a big deal this really is, because in fact, two thirds of carts and
checkouts are abandoned.
That is huge.
Imagine if you're making $10,000 a month in sales.
That means you could potentially lose $6,600 in sales purely through abandoned carts and checkouts.
Now, first of all, don't panic because of course I'm going to show you how to recover these carts
and not lose those potential sales.
But before we get into the various techniques, let's have a look at the top ten reasons for abandoned
carts and checkouts.
And you're going to see that many of these we've already solved with everything that I've taught you
leading up to this point.
So the first reason is that the shipping costs are too high.
Well, you will remember that we are doing it free shipping, so there is no way that the shipping costs
can be too high.
People will not be abandoning our cart or our checkout for that reason.
Next up we have that the site wanted me to create an account.
Now you've probably seen this with your own online experiences, sometimes at a store, even before
you can pay for the product, you are forced to make an account on the site itself.
Now, while that's of interest to the store owner because it can help with customer retention for the
very first purchase, it is way too early in the process.
Most people are not ready to create an account.
They're not ready to give over that information and therefore they leave.
Now, just to be clear, and as you have already seen, Shopify does not require our customers to create
an account by default.
But just for completeness, if you ever needed to create customer accounts for your customers, then
it really is very straightforward.
Simply come over to the settings where you can see I'm already on the settings for the checkout itself,
and then come down here and check this box.
Require the customer to log in to their account before checkout.
The next reason is that the checkout process is too long and complicated.
Well, I think you would agree that the checkout itself on Shopify is very well designed.
It is definitely not too long and it is definitely not too complicated.
After that we have that.
The total cost is not clear.
Again, the way Shopify presents this information very clearly within both the cart and the checkout,
it is highly unlikely that on your site they will be leaving due to the fact that they cannot figure
out what the total cost really is.
And then the fifth one, which is a big one, something I've been talking about an enormous amount on
this course, and that is that the person doesn't trust the site.
So much of what we've been talking about, so much of what I've been teaching you has been focused on
this.
I have been emphasizing over and over again that we have to build a trustworthy site.
And so if you've taken action and you've implemented everything I've showed you, this should not be
a problem.
After that, we have that the delivery is too slow.
Again, we've talked about this a lot on the course because sometimes with dropshipping this can be
a problem.
But I've given you the solutions.
I've shown you how you can get fast shipping.
Yes.
We cannot do next day delivery because as I've said, we're not a multi-billion dollar company, but
we can provide very acceptable shipping times.
And therefore, for the most part, this really shouldn't be an issue.
Next up, website errors or it has crashed.
Well, again, we're on Shopify here, a platform that essentially has a 100% uptime.
I have never seen Shopify crash, and I have never seen some kind of weird error page.
It simply doesn't happen.
The returns policy was unsatisfactory.
So we talked about returns policy relatively recently.
And I gave you returns policy that is extremely customer friendly.
It is, in my opinion, extremely satisfactory.
And you should therefore get very few complaints, very few reasons that somebody would abandon the
checkout based on your returns policy.
Number nine on the list is that there were not enough payment methods.
Well, I've showed you that with PayPal you can accept already PayPal and any credit cards, but in
many cases you can also get a second payment provider.
It's not essential, but if you're able to and it makes sense, that only goes to increase the number
of payment methods that you can offer.
But even with just PayPal or even with a single payment provider, you should have plenty of payment
methods on offer.
And then last but not least, the credit card was declined.
Well, really, that's not our problem.
I mean, if somebody's credit card is declined, it can be for many reasons.
For example, they've maxed it out or perhaps the expiry date has passed.
Things which at the end of the day are simply not in our control.
So there you go.
Those are the top ten reasons for abandoned carts and checkouts.
And having gone down through that list and realized that, in fact, we have solved many of these already,
you might be thinking to yourself, well, where's the problem?
Am I really going to get an awful lot of abandoned carts and checkouts because my site is really well
designed?
Well, unfortunately you still are, because I think that there's one major thing missing off this list
and that is distraction.
Let me explain.
Whenever we go online, we are constantly distracted, whether it's through other websites, something
popping up on your PC, maybe your phone goes.
It could be anything.
We have distractions all over the place.
I have no doubt you've done exactly that.
At some point you've got to the cart, you've got to the checkout and something has happened.
You've had to leave or you've simply lost focus.
You don't come back.
So with that in mind, and we also need to accept that we haven't fully solved all of these ten reasons.
We definitely still need to address this problem of abandoned carts and checkouts.
So how do we do it?
Well, let's have a look at the first solution in the next lecture.