Always Be Closing: How to Reduce B2B Shopping Cart Abandonment

Don't stop the race before you get to the finish line! An optimized B2B shopping cart ensures a seamless end to your customer's journey, and it's one of the most important moments in the total shopping experience. If ignored, shopping cart abandonment can have direct negative impacts on your business, but with the right strategies, you can recover lost sales, improve customer retention, and increase revenue. This article outlines five essential tactics to minimize cart abandonment for B2B buyers and optimize your online checkout process. In the process, you'll be offering your customers a more efficient and more satisfying transaction.

5 Ways to Guide Customers Through the Checkout Process

Simplify Form Fields

The average checkout contains nearly 12 form fields!  Think about your customer’s experience having to complete all of those fields. Now imagine a B2B customer who makes repeat purchases, or who has to make many purchases from many vendors in a given day. The B2B shopping experience has unique considerations, and you want to make your B2B buyers' journey as efficient as possible. Reduce form field clutter by only including essential information. You might consider merging fields like "first name," "middle initial," and "last name" into a single field, or collapsing secondary information such as "Address Line 2" and "Company Name."

Pre-Fill Information

Customers dislike having to input the same information twice, for good reason. Save your customers more time during the checkout process and thereby give them less reasons to abandon their carts by pre-filling fields like the cardholder's name and address information. Any user-supplied account preferences, such as credit card, order processing, shipping address, and more can be auto-filled to save the customer time and effort. Let customers know that their checkout will be quick and easy, offering one-page checkout from the shopping cart which auto-populates account information. Your returning customers, such as wholesale buyers, will receive a more personalized shopping experience if forms are already filled out on their behalf.

Protect Customer Privacy

With data breaches skyrocketing over the past few years, it's crucial to ensure customer information remains secure. Only collect the necessary information to process an order and provide clear explanations for any additional data requests, but most importantly, be upfront with customers about how their data is handled. A brief explanation about your privacy, security, and fraud prevention policies can go a long way in reducing customer apprehension and increasing conversion rates. Furthermore, your wholesale accounts may need specific assurances spelled out right in the B2B shopping cart, to satisfy security requirements for their own businesses.

Offer Guest Checkout and Account Creation Options

While customer accounts provide valuable data, requiring all users to create an account during checkout can create a hurdle to completion. Some users may prefer to check out as a guest for a variety of reasons, including privacy or time savings. Existing B2B buyers most likely will already have an account set up on your site, but a good way to entice new buyers is to make the checkout as painless as possible. Offering a guest checkout option alongside account creation can make transactions feel quick, easy, and appealing. We explore the full benefits of guest checkout here.

Integrate Trusted Payment Options

Providing a popular and trusted payment option such as PayPal has become essential for modern B2B ecommerce businesses. Offering payment alternatives gives customers more flexibility, and can lead to higher conversion rates, while a lack of payment options might feel limiting. This is especially true for customers who may prefer particular payment methods/brands due to specific buyer protection guarantees, and brand familiarity.

Streamlining your B2B shopping cart and checkout leads to more satisfied customers and completed transactions

Creating a more streamlined B2B shopping cart experience is a great way to reduce cart abandonment and increase revenue. It’s also a way to cultivate an online experience which respects the time and preferences of this specific type of buyer. When you can save your B2B customers time and make their transaction feel effortless, you are making their work easier—setting a foundation for loyal shoppers who return again and again. When improving the checkout experiences, focus on simplifying form fields, pre-filling customer information, enhancing site security, protecting customer privacy, offering guest checkout, and implementing popular payment options. With these strategies, you'll create a smoother, more efficient shopping experience—an impression your customers will take with them after the transaction is done.

This blog was originally published on February 20, 2018 and updated on April 7, 2023.