Running an E-commerce store is not an easy task. It requires you to pour money into branding, content creation, social advertising, referral marketing, SEO, and SEM so you can become visible to online shoppers. Then, you need to invest in UI/UX and CRO strategies so you can give your users a great customer journey.
However, a regular issue that you find as an eCommerce owner is the abandoned shopping carts. Baymard Institute analyzed more than 44 different abandonment cart rate reports, finding out that this percentage is nearly 70%. These reports also show that if these businesses optimize their checkout process, they could be regaining $260B from abandonment orders.
To achieve these goals, there are cart abandonment solutions that you can use to prevent shopping cart abandonment. In this post, we will discuss the strategies you should follow to reduce the number of lost sales of your eCommerce business.
What is Cart Abandonment?
Cart abandonment happens when a potential customer has initiated the buying process and decides to leave the shopping cart without making a purchase. Abandoned carts are a big concern for an eCommerce website because they represent a huge lost opportunity to generate a sale.
Customers abandon a product because of several factors like:
- dPoor user experience or not user-friendly.
- Complicated checkout processes in the eCommerce platform.
- High shipping costs.
- A lot of website errors.
- Invasive pop-up strategy.
Common Reasons for Cart Abandonment
You need to know that you will never fully get rid of cart abandonment, this is just how eCommerce goes. What you will be doing is working to reduce shopping cart abandonment so you can have more sales. You can start by separating the reasons for abandoned carts, which are usually the following:
- Hidden costs
One reason why you may be having abandonment shopping carts is because of the hidden costs. You need to be clear from the beginning about exactly what the customer is going to pay when purchasing your products. An online store should show how many fees, taxes, shipping costs, etc, the buyer is going to pay before getting their goods.
- Forcing creating a user account
Some users don’t want to create an account to give you user data for future recommendations. They only want to purchase and not come back. This customer behavior is present, and it could take away several sales if you don’t allow that to your site visitors.
- Complexity
Ecommerce is aware of the latest best practices regarding user experience, and they try to provide this to as many customers as possible. So, if an eCommerce site doesn’t comply with these practices, like having a complicated checkout process, you will give a bad customer experience.
- No security measures
An e-commerce website needs to have security measures to ensure that personal information is not used for any bad purpose or shared with third parties. If there aren’t any signs to potential customers that online retailers won’t use their information, they may be abandoning their carts.
- Slow delivery
Online retailers should offer fast and secured deliveries. An abandoned cart happens when the website doesn’t provide enough information about the date the products are arriving or several delivery methods so they can arrive faster. Sometimes, if you offer free shipping, you can overcome the need of having a fast delivery.
You should also include an indicator that shows how much is left for you to receive the product.
- Unclear return policies
Having unclear return policies when a customer is buying a product is a reason why you have shopping cart abandonment. An e-commerce site must always be clear about how to return an item as part of a customer engagement strategy to gain their trust.
Businesses with these policies encourage customers to buy without any insecurity, which could increase potential sales.
- Not enough payment options
When a customer chooses a payment method, it is because they feel comfortable with it. This is why most eCommerce platforms offer a variety of ways to make payments as a way to target customers. If a shopper visits your website and you don’t have the payment he/she uses, you will increase your abandonment rates.
- Not having an Auto-save cart option
When visitors leave after they start a purchase process, it makes sense to have an auto-save cart option, so they don’t have to start over in case they come back. This is the reason why you may have lost revenue if you haven’t implemented it in your business.
How to Calculate eCommerce Cart Abandon Rate
If you want to calculate your cart abandonment rate, you have to divide the completed transactions by the shopping carts created. Then, you subtract this value from 1 and multiply it to get the total percentage.
For example: Let’s say that you have 22 purchases and 80 carts were created. The formula would be like this: 1-2280*100= 72.5%.
Once you know this value, you can start to look for the factors that represent this shopping cart abandonment rate and fix them.
Solutions That Can Help Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment rates will never go to zero, you will always have people that leave your store without making a purchase. Having said this, you should always monitor your average cart abandonment rate and drop reports so you can develop strategies to improve your sales funnel.
Abandoned cart strategies will work differently according to the niche your business is developed. This is why you need to try different tactics and find the ones that work better with your marketing funnel.
Email Remarketing
According to Experian, cart abandonment emails can increase purchases at least 19 times more than standard emails.
When a customer doesn’t complete a checkout process, sending them an email is an effective way to make them come back. This is what remarketing emails are used for. Emails are still one of the best and most effective marketing tools to retarget customers.
However, these need to be customized emails, where you offer customers relevant information about what they are looking for without excessive spam.
You can capture their email through an exit-intent overlay before they leave the cart so they can save their basket. This allows you to use the contact information for email remarketing once they’ve left your site. But you shouldn’t use this to spam your customers.
The goal is to keep your customers informed about their abandoned carts so they can come back later and use a follow-up email to help the customer close the sale.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads help you find potential customers and turn them into completed orders by using information about their interests. This is because customers don’t usually buy the first time they visit your website. You need to pass them through a sales funnel to succeed. Only 2% of visitors complete orders on their first visit. This is why you should use personalized ads.
Now, even though it seems quite easy to get the attention of your clients, it is not. Customers are using ad blockers to prevent ads from being shown. According to Statista, almost 25% of consumers have ad blockers installed. This means that when using retargeting strategies like these, at least ¼ of all consumers won’t see your ads.
Chat Support
Sometimes, cart abandonment occurs due to a lack of human contact during transactions. Therefore, chat support could help your eCommerce business finalize deals. As part of your cart abandonment strategy, the goal of the chat is to offer a quick and helpful solution to the questions your customers may have. This way, you can make sure that your clients are happy with your website and even recover abandoned carts.
Say that you own a tech story. A customer finds a laptop that he wants to buy, but there isn’t any left. So, when your customer is about to leave, your chat support appears to help them find a solution for their missing product and get a cart recovery. You can even offer a discount code for the missing item in your stock and that way ensure a sale of another product.
Guest Checkout
As an online store owner, you know that personal data is important for your business to run tailored ads. The thing is that you shouldn’t put data before user experience. This is why it’s a bad idea to make your potential customers create an account before finishing the checkout process. This is one of the fastest ways to lose a client.
Instead, you should offer guest checkout procedures, so any visitor that wants to buy something in a hurry can do it without having to add more information to complete the purchase. It’s more likely that if you have provided a good experience, you will have returning customers.
Now, in case you want to get more information for your campaigns and retargeting emails, you could still deploy a small survey at the end once the purchase is verified.
SMS Remarketing
SMS is one of the most immediate ways to reach your customers. A study found out that 95% of the texts will be read within the next 3 minutes of being received. This is a great time to use this kind of strategy because there are more people buying products via mobile phone.
Ecommerce brands use SMS to:
- Make reminders about abandoned carts on the checkout page.
- Release discounts for re-engaging visitors.
- Mention them the release of a new product.
If you run your strategy correctly, it could be one of the cart abandonment solutions for you.
Exit-intent Overlays
Another useful shopping cart abandonment solution is introducing exit intent technology. It identifies when a shopper is giving an exit behavior on your website, showing a well-timed overlay that encourages them to stay. Usually, they are special discounts if the customers are on the checkout pages.
Configuring your overlay, you can even detect when your customers are looking to compare prices with competitors. Then, you can add an exit overlay to show a promotion on the exact item the customer is trying to compare.
Abandoned checkouts hurt, but still, you can’t set up this strategy in a reckless way. Always deploy it subtly and based on a data-driven understanding of your customers. Otherwise, you could end up upsetting them, turning them into cart abandoners.
Free Shipping
Adding an extra cost to a product when a customer is about to buy it might make him quit that purchase. This is what happens when you add an extra shipping cost to the cart in your eCommerce store. This represents a bad checkout experience and may be a reason why you have an increase in cart abandonment.
The best thing you can do is maintain transparency during the customer journey to prevent this issue. This way, the shopper will know how much it will cost, resulting in fewer abandoned carts.
Social Proof
Reviews and customer comments are as important as the quality of the product you sell in your store. Many customers use them to determine whether they should buy in a particular store. Social proof increases the credibility of the website, which is why many store owners avoid negative reviews at all costs.
If you manage to find good critics from customers, the incoming customers could increase their average order value when they purchase. Comments don’t have to be about the product itself only. They can refer to the delivery time, payment methods, customer support, the website’s security, like having an SSL certificate, etc.
Tools to Help You with Cart Abandonment
These tools will help you drive multi-step campaigns in your online business and have better control over your cart abandonment.
CartStack
CartStack is a cart recovery tool that allows you to send email and SMS reminders or push notifications to your customers so they can recover their abandoned carts. It’s an on-site tool that shouldn’t be missing in your store if you want to reduce cart abandonment.
Rejoiner
Rejoiner is another part of the shopping cart abandonment solutions you can use to set up emails and personalize them to remind your customers about a pending transaction in your platform. This is a plugin that you can install on your website.
You can also use the data gathered by it to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. High-volume retailers use Rejoiner to regain their lost customers and offer a great deal as part of the strategy.
CrazyEgg
Crazyegg is an awesome tool that you should use to find out what your customers see when they make a purchase. The plugin allows you to see exactly what and where the visitors have clicked, so you can use this information to add items strategically in those spots.
This will help you increase your conversion rate and let the visitors see what they want, which translates into fewer abandoned carts.
Olark
Olark is a live chat solution that allows you to talk to your visitors in real-time. In an essential way, you would need this tool to learn what your customers are looking for and what is missing in your store.
This is the best solution for communication issues because it’s not invasive, allowing for endless conversations. When Olark is used in stores the business owner can:
- Learn what pages are giving problems to the customers.
- If social channels are working properly.
- What products are missing information or aren’t well-described?
- Know about a serious problem in the store and take action.
This feature is a cart abandonment solution because it lets you get closer to the customer and listen to them to improve your business.
Conclusions
There are many reasons why you should have cart abandonment solutions in mind when running a business online store. Besides having in mind the price of the goods and having other social channels to promote your brand, you also need proven strategies to make sure that you are making the most out of it.
Top solutions for cart abandonment, like a live chat option, can help you re-engage with most of your customers and prospects. Leading brands know this, and it’s the reason why they are so successful.
FAQ
Why Is an Abandoned Cart a Problem for Businesses?
For businesses an abandoned cart represents, in the first place, a product that hasn’t been sold. In the second place is a client that can be potentially drawn to the competition if you don’t make the sale.
This is why online stores use, for example, abandoned cart emails to send reminders to customers that have left the platform without making a purchase.
How Abandoned Orders Affect Inventory?
A store is run by an inventory of available products you can offer potential customers to make a sale. When a customer abandons a cart, the product is charged to it and is subtracted from the available stock.
This concerns businesses because the practice can lower the inventory and therefore, lose sales.
What Is The Average Cart Abandonment Rate?
According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate for 2020 was 69.82%. This was calculated through a search of information and crossing data with 46 studies.
SEO enthusiast and digital marketing strategist. My expertise lies in optimizing websites for organic traffic growth and search engine visibility. I carry out, among others, SEO tests, keyword research and analytical activities using Google Analytics. Privately, he is a lover of mountains and bicycle trips.