Image credit: jessicahtam
Not every shopper wants or is ready to buy your product or service right this moment. There is nothing you can do about that. But what you can do is encourage them to come back later.
A good method of doing just that is to provide an “add to wishlist” or “save for later” option in your shopping cart. You don’t want this call to action to be equal to or to overpower the primary “add to cart” or “checkout” options, but as a smaller, secondary option in case they are not ready to buy now.
Allowing visitors to save items in their cart will often lead to more sales later. [Tweet This]
Think about it. What if the visitor adds several things to their cart but the price is more than they want to spend now? If they can’t save items into a wishlist, those items will be deleted forever, or until the customer decides to come back to look for them.
But suppose they forgot they even wanted those items. The sale on those is lost, possibly forever. When those items are instead moved to a wishlist, that wishlist is there to remind them the very next time they log in! Instead of forcing the shopper to remember and re-add the product to the cart, this simple option does it for them. The only thing left is for them to push the item from the wishlist to the cart.
Many shoppers will leave items in their wishlist for months before buying. Every item in their wishlist is still a potential sale to come, which is much better than starting with nothing.