"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

(Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense)

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E-commerce is bleeding billions due to cart abandonment, posing a daunting challenge within the e-commerce ecosystem, with an abandonment rate of 70.19% (according to the Baymard Institute). Businesses lose $18 billion yearly from unfinished transactions alone. Certain industries are more severely impacted: 

• The travel sector, including cruise and ferry websites, faces the highest rates with up to 98% of carts being abandoned
•  The fashion industry experiences rates of approximately 87.79%, 
•  The mobile providers and airline industries contend with abandonment rates of 90%. 

Despite the prevalence of cart abandonment, awareness among stakeholders and e-tailers varies. Reports indicate that 74% of e-commerce managers recognize cart abandonment as a critical issue, yet only 40% actively track and analyze this data to understand its financial impact. Here's the kicker: Instead of relying on remarketing strategies, businesses should focus on addressing the psychological, UI, and especially money transfer issues that lead to abandoned carts in online shopping.

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Combating buyer's fatigue

Cart abandonment often boils down to decision fatigue; when shoppers are bombarded with too many choices, their mental bandwidth gets maxed out, leading to exhaustion and cart abandonment before purchase completion, which is why many strategies now focus on simplification:

• Simplify choices: Reduce the number of product options and streamline the decision-making process. Apple, for example, simplified its product lineup, boosting sales.
• Provide clear and full information: Ensure that product descriptions are clear and concise, providing all necessary information to make an informed decision without needing to browse through multiple pages. Amazon’s product pages exemplify this approach by highlighting key details and comparisons.
• Optimize navigation: Design an intuitive and straightforward navigation system to minimize the effort required to find and select products. Think about how easy it is to work with Google’s clean and user-friendly interface.

Easier checkout processes

A complicated checkout process significantly deters customers from completing purchases. Here's how you can simplify it: Streamline steps: Reduce the number of required fields and steps to complete a purchases; Guest checkout: Let customers checkout without creating an account ;Multiple payment options: Offer various payment gateways and ensure the site is mobile-optimized.

Payment decline and cart abandonment

However, there is the elephant in the room. Customers get really irritated when they encounter incorrect prices or face payment declines at checkout. This doesn’t just lead to cart abandonment; it also destroys the trust and credibility of the e-commerce site. For example, 42% of consumers will abandon their cart if their payment is declined due to suspected fraud. Studies show that customers are more likely to get upset and switch to a competitor after facing a payment decline. This perfect storm of lost sales and damaged reputation screams for exact pricing and a frictionless payment process.

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Revolutionizing revenue recovery with Bounce

Bounce identifies and approves false card declines, converting them into successful transactions using advanced machine learning algorithms. This approach not only recovers lost revenue but also enhances customer satisfaction by ensuring legitimate transactions are not mistakenly rejected. Bounce's ML algorithm works seamlessly in real-time to approve valid transactions, ensuring legitimate sales are not lost and a smooth user experience. This immediate, yet seamless, intervention helps:

• Increase top line revenue: Recover over 30% of falsely declined transactions, which adds 5% to your top-line revenue.
• Improve KPIs: Enhance key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates and customer satisfaction by reducing false card declines.
• Enhance customer trust: Provide a smoother, user friendly checkout experience, reducing frustration and improving satisfaction.

Compared to retargeting

Bounce’s solution tackles the root cause of lost sales, proving to be more cost-effective than retargeting campaigns. Retargeting can hike conversion rates by up to 128%, but it comes with extra marketing costs. Preventing false card declines directly recovers sales without additional ad spend, offering a higher ROI.

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Don’t let potential sales slip through the cracks

Ready to claw back your lost revenue from false declines? Schedule a demo with Bounce to see how our revolutionary solution can turn hidden losses into wins. Don’t let potential sales slip through the cracks—let Bounce elevate your conversion rate and customer satisfaction. For more information, visit Bounce.

Consider how visitors navigate through your website before making a purchase. They typically start on the homepage, browse between the different products, add items to their cart, and then proceed to complete the purchase at checkout. However, this journey is rarely smooth. In this blog post, you'll discover exactly where and how to eliminate any potential or existing marketing funnel friction for your B2C and B2Ds all the way to checkout.

Limit landing page distractions 

The first point in both B2C and B2D marketing funnel friction is the landing page experience. A single issue on the landing page can cause visitors to leave prematurely. In fact 53% of visitors will abandon a page after only three seconds. This happens if visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, the loading time is too slow, or if the site has functional or usability problems.

Ensuring a seamless and user-friendly landing page experience is crucial to keeping customers engaged.

5 fundamentals of a spot-on landing page: 

1. Create a headline that demands attention: Craft a headline that resonates with the target audience's needs and desires, using powerful action words and emotionally charged language.
2. Use a hero image to bring your offers to life: Incorporate a visually appealing hero image that grabs visitors' attention and encourages engagement, while ensuring fast loading speeds.
3. Create calls to action that inspire action: Design clear and persuasive calls to action (CTAs) that represent the conversion goal, personalized to the audience and campaign objectives.
4. Provide form fields that make conversion easy: Simplify the conversion process by minimizing form fields to only essential information, ensuring a user-friendly 
5. Offer social proofs to build trust: Utilize social proofs such as customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to establish credibility and trust with potential customers, ultimately boosting conversion rates.

Simplify product navigation:

How you present and organize the products and offerings on your site can make-or-break your business. If your website has poor navigation, limited search functionality, or a cluttered layout, customers may struggle to discover the products that interest them, thus causing a whole lot of friction during the product discovery process. This can lead to frustration and abandonment of the shopping process, and of course a failure to arrive at checkout. 

Good design, coupled with intelligent and robust catalog search capabilities, hold the power to eliminate a major friction or pain point from the marketing funnel.

5 key product discovery strategies to improve navigation 

1. High-quality images/videos: Provide multiple images/videos for each product to showcase its features.
2. Advanced filtering/sorting: Offer robust options to narrow down searches by price, size, color, etc.
3. Personalized recommendations: Use AI for tailored product suggestions based on user behavior.
4. Improved search: Implement features like autocomplete and predictive search for quicker results.
5. Interactive previews: Allow users to view essential product details without leaving the page.

Make trust an absolute must 

The inability to convey trust just might be costing you a lot of revenue. Communicating trust or adding "trust elements" is crucial in online transactions, especially in the realm of online shopping where you're betting on the fact that a person will have a good enough experience that they'll gladly go to checkout, hand you their credit card details, and pay you money. 

While it is especially important at the payment stage, if a potential customer does not feel a sense of trust, this can create major friction in the marketing funnel, it will be very hard to reel them back in again. 

3 key elements to boost trust 

1. Secure payment options: Offering secure payment methods such as credit card processing, PayPal, or other trusted payment gateways instills confidence in customers that their financial information will be protected.
2. Customer reviews and testimonials: Displaying genuine customer reviews and testimonials provides social proof of the quality and reliability of your products or services, helping to build trust with potential customers.
3. Clear return and refund policies: Transparent and easy-to-understand return and refund policies reassure customers that they can shop with confidence, knowing that they have options in case they are not satisfied with their purchase.

Ensure product information accuracy

Providing clear and detailed product information is essential for guiding customers through the purchasing decision. If customers can't find necessary information such as product specifications, pricing, or availability, they may hesitate to complete their purchase. High-quality images, product reviews, and comparison tools can help customers feel confident in their decision.

3 strategies to maintain product information accuracy

1. Regular updates: Ensure that product details such as pricing, availability, and specifications are regularly updated to reflect any changes accurately.
2. Quality control measures: Implement processes to verify the accuracy of product information before it is published on your website or presented to customers.
3. Customer feedback: Solicit feedback from customers regarding the accuracy and completeness of product information. This can help identify any discrepancies or areas for improvement.

Simplify the checkout process 

A lengthy and intricate checkout process often leads to customers abandoning their payment. Each extra step and form field prolongs the payment procedure and adds to the difficulty. Since customers prefer a straightforward and convenient process, any additional steps can negatively impact your user experience. 

Once customers have selected their desired products, the next marketing funnel friction point can occur when trying to add items to their cart. Complicated checkout processes, unexpected fees, or technical issues can deter customers from completing their purchase. It's important to streamline the process of adding items to the cart and provide transparency in pricing to minimize friction.

1. Streamline form fields: Reduce the number of required fields to only essential information, such as name, shipping address, and payment details.
2. Implement guest checkout: Allow customers to complete their purchase without creating an account, reducing friction for first-time buyers.
3. Offer multiple payment options: Provide various payment methods, including credit/debit cards, digital wallets, and alternative payment solutions, catering to diverse customer preferences.
4. Auto-fill and save information: Enable auto-fill features to populate form fields with saved information and offer the option to save details for future purchases, saving time and effort for returning customers.

For more tips, check out this article where we explore the different ways you can improve your checkout conversion rate.

Make sure the payment was completed

Even after your customer clicks the "pay" button, you’re still in danger of a lost deal. Many promising transactions fail due to card declines, with an average of 10% of checkout purchases failing at this crucial stage. Merchants often overlook this issue, but it can result in significant revenue loss and wasted marketing expenses. 

Bounce helps you detect false card declines and recover over 30% of them seamlessly and in real time, ensuring you maximize revenue and minimize losses.

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“People in all fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”

 (Moneyball)

It’s September, and while most people are winding down from Labor Day, for online shop owners like you, it’s not just the end of summer—it’s the start of something bigger. With Labor Day sales fresh in mind, you’re already looking ahead to the next big events: Black Friday on November 29th and Cyber Monday on December 2nd. These days mark the beginning of the high-sales season, a crucial period that can significantly impact your financial year. “In 2023, Cyber Monday alone generated $12.4 billion in online sales in the U.S, offering merchants a prime opportunity to boost revenue and expand their customer base.

As a Shopify merchant, you’re not just thinking about sales; you’re strategizing on how to handle the surge in traffic, optimize Shopify checkout process, and provide an exceptional shopping experience. While others are still months away from considering holiday shopping, you’re already preparing your store to capitalize on this peak season. Gone are the days when every operational detail needed hands-on management, platforms like Shopify offer integrated solutions for inventory management, payment processing, and marketing automation, enabling you to focus on scaling and enhancing customer satisfaction.

However, the platform also presents some challenges that need to be addressed to fully 

capitalize on the upcoming shopping season:

Understanding main checkout challenges with your Shopify app

1.Shopify’s built-in fraud detection can be overly conservative, leading to legitimate transactions being flagged as fraudulent. In fact, NoFraud’s analysis found that 84.4% of “medium risk” orders were actually safe, meaning most of these good deals were wrongly declined. 

2. International transactions and abandoned checkouts: Cross-border transactions are often flagged as high-risk, leading to higher false decline rates and increased cart abandonment.

3.Subscription and recurring payments: Recurring payment models on Shopify are particularly susceptible to issues with false declines because the platform relies on third-party apps for subscription management, which can lead to higher rates of payment failures and involuntary churn, causing significant revenue loss for businesses dependent on consistent income streams.

Proven ways to optimize your Shopify checkout process

Here are four effective strategies to optimize your Shopify checkout and prepare for the busy shopping season:

•  Third-party fraud tools: Tools like Signifyd or NoFraud offer more precise fraud detection, reducing false declines and maintaining customer trust by using advanced machine learning algorithms. 
• Multiple payment methods: Incorporate digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal to provide customers with more payment options.
• Streamline the checkout process: Simplify the steps required to complete a purchase by enabling guest checkouts and removing unnecessary fields. Bold Checkout, for example, offers customizable solutions that can help reduce cart abandonment and boost conversions.
• Real-time payment analytics: Solutions like ReCharge and Klarna provide real-time insights into payment trends, helping you anticipate and resolve potential issues quickly. 
• Recover lost revenue with AI: Bounce reduces false declines and enhances payment experiences using cutting-edge machine learning technology.

While these strategies are effective, they often lack a comprehensive solution that integrates false credit card decline analysis with data-supported insights into a single platform. That’s where Bounce’s new Shopify app comes in—with its Payment Health Analysis.

Now, with our new Shopify app, we go beyond optimization and enable data-driven insights from real payment date

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Meet Bounce: data-driven Shopify app

We are excited to introduce Bounce’s new Shopify app, powered by advanced machine learning to help Shopify merchants:

• Optimize financial performance and uncover hidden revenue streams. Our app offers comprehensive analysis, providing:
• Real-time monitoring of your store’s payment health and performance. With data-driven revenue insights, the app helps you identify trends and optimize for greater profitability. App also focuses on loss prevention by detecting potential issues before they impact your bottom line, ensuring financial stability.
• A user-friendly dashboard, the app offers a no-code, customizable interface, making it easy to visualize key metrics and make informed decisions quickly.

Needless to say, our app is seamlessly integrated with Shopify, enhancing your checkout process without any disruption to your existing workflow. 

Gain a clear advantage with data-driven payment insights

With Bounce’s payments health analysis, your e-commerce business gains a competitive edge by turning data into actionable insights. The app offers a comprehensive view of your payment flow, including:

• Total transactions
• Total declined transactions
• Decline rate 
• Credit card type distribution 
• decline rate per credit card type 
• Customer retries breakdown
• Decline rate by nationality 
• Decline reason distribution
• Bounce potential
• Decline rate for a certain period 
• Geographical trends

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This allows you to pinpoint revenue-draining issues and uncover hidden opportunities. By monitoring payment trends, decline patterns, and customer behaviors in real time, you can optimize your checkout experience, reduce declines, and enhance revenue capture. This holistic approach not only improves financial performance but also equips you with the knowledge to make strategic, data-driven decisions that propel your business forward.

With proven results, Bounce will bring in the best position for the e-commerce high season. Explore our new app on the Shopify App Store today.

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