What Is Cart Abandonment Rate?
Cart abandonment is a major concern for e-commerce businesses. Let’s look at it from a physical store perspective. Suppose a customer enters your shop and puts a few items in their cart but suddenly drops it and walks out. What will you do? Probably approach them and try to sort out any inconveniences, right?
Well, this often happens in online shops, and this time, you can’t simply approach the customer to find the exact reason. Nearly 70% of online shoppers who begin a purchase will abandon their carts before completing the purchase. This indicates more severe problems with the purchasing process than just lost sales.
Cart abandonment rate is a metric that measures how frequently online shoppers add items to their virtual shopping carts but then leave the site without making a purchase. Tackling this issue is paramount to ensuring high conversion rates.
In this article, we will examine cart abandonment rates, why they occur, and, most importantly, how to reduce them and increase your chances of transforming browsing visitors into returning customers.
What is shopping cart abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment occurs when customers add items but choose not to complete the purchase. This may occur for several reasons, including changing their mind about the purchase, the cost of shipping exceeding their budget, or a lack of access to the appropriate payment methods.
The proportion of online buyers who add products to a virtual shopping cart but abandon them before purchasing is known as the shopping cart abandonment rate. It shows the percentage of potential customers interested in your product but haven’t decided to buy compared to the total number of shopping carts created.
To find the shopping cart abandonment rate, divide the total number of purchases completed by the total number of shopping carts created.
A high abandonment rate may indicate a broken sales funnel or a subpar user experience, making the shopping cart abandonment rate a crucial metric for e-commerce sites to monitor. Many online retailers prioritize optimizing the checkout process because it reduces shopping cart abandonment, which increases sales and revenue.
How to reduce shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment has numerous potential causes, making it a challenging issue. The first step in resolving the problem is to generate hypotheses about why visitors abandon their carts. You can map out where shoppers drop off by creating detailed conversion funnels with tools like Google’s Advanced E-commerce Analytics. You can use a funnel visualization tool to generate a report that shows which pages customers visit and how long they stay at each funnel stage.
A/B testing can be used to test various solutions on the website after a hypothesis has been developed to ascertain whether a suggested solution will help lower the shopping cart abandonment rate.
On your payment page, a high drop-off rate may be a sign of confusing calls to action, an inadequate number of available payment methods, or a malfunctioning website. The reports may also identify irrationalities in your funnel; for example, requiring customers to exit the shopping cart to sign in increases the likelihood of drop-off. You can improve the user flow by using these insights.
Businesses can create a more seamless and user-friendly experience by streamlining the checkout process and minimizing the steps needed. Providing autofill options is one way to reduce the number of steps customers must take to complete a purchase, which helps further reduce friction. Furthermore, businesses can identify and apply the procedures that result in the highest conversion rates by regularly conducting A/B testing of different checkout flows.
You can continuously raise your conversion rate and make more money without spending more on traffic by hypothesizing why customers remove items from a cart they have already added and testing new concepts for streamlining the sales funnel.
Shopping cart recovery
Cart recovery is an essential strategy for addressing cart abandonment and contributes to improving and optimizing the shopping cart experience.
Re-engaging customers who have added items to their online shopping carts but still need to complete the checkout process is the goal of the shopping cart recovery marketing strategy. By using this strategy, online retailers remind these customers of the items they still have in their carts and nudge them to complete their purchases.
There are two main methods of cart recovery:
1. Abandoned cart emails
If the customer is a regular user, he may have filled out a form with his contact information and most likely logged in before making the purchase. As a result, it is typical to obtain a customer’s email address, details about the goods they were thinking of buying, and the time of their order cancellation decision.
Abandoned cart recovery emails notify customers that they couldn’t complete the purchase, indicating the urgency of the matter. The email should ideally have a relevant call-to-action (CTA) that directs the customer to the product page or checkout page, depending on the order’s status, so he can finish placing his order with a few clicks. The email should also contain the brand’s contact information so the customer can address any issues that might have come up when he first abandoned the cart.
2. Abandoned cart retargeting
Ad retargeting is a popular tactic for recovering abandoned carts; it shows users the products they have previously added to the cart on various platforms, encouraging them to pick up where they left off with their purchases. This implies that once the customer leaves the online store, they will see an advertisement for the product later on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat. This marketing strategy is intriguing because it targets a person who has expressed interest in purchasing the product.
Customers who see ads with tailored content are 40% more likely to interact with them and make a purchase. Start by politely reminding customers that they left their cart behind and encouraging them to complete the transaction. Use multiple retargeting channels to ensure your ads appear on social media and the web.
Common reasons for shopping cart abandonment
Recognizing the reasons behind customers’ cart abandonment is essential to optimizing the checkout process. Some typical problems that many websites encounter and that lead to cart abandonment:
High additional costs (taxes, shipping, and other fees)
After adding an item to their cart, a prospective customer may decide not to proceed with the purchase if they find out about additional costs. They are less likely to continue once they see the additional costs.
According to a Baymard Institute study, 48% of customers who intended to buy, that is, those who were not just window shopping, abandoned their shopping carts because the additional expenses—shipping, taxes, and fees were expensive.
Provide customers with a complete breakdown of all costs upfront, including shipping charges, applicable taxes, and other fees.
Complexity
Online customers have short attention spans, so if the checkout process is complicated or time-consuming, they will abandon it. The standard checkout procedure is as follows: Shopping cart > billing info > shipping info > shipping method > order preview > payment > confirmation.
A checkout process that deviates from a reasonable flow of steps may put off customers. Inquiring about the customer’s phone number, gender, or date of birth is an example of requesting too much information to complete the purchase.
Lack of payment options
Customers have strong concerns about data breaches, which are common, and contactless payment methods (smart watches and digital wallets) are common. As a result, customers want a variety of payment options. Online shoppers want to be able to make payments using their preferred method. Your customers may walk away from you if they have options. Customers may leave if they add products to their cart and then discover they can’t purchase with the payment method of their choice.
Provide as many ways for customers to pay as you can. Start with the most widely used payment methods to minimize costs and work your way up. Provide PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and additional specialized payment options when available.
Inadequate return policy
Online shoppers accept a certain amount of risk because they can’t view or handle the product before purchasing. Particularly for expensive purchases, customers need to feel confident that they can return an item or get a refund if it has a flaw or is not up to par. A weak or lousy return policy will drive away customers and cause them to search for another store to purchase the goods. They might come back, but they might be able to find a better return policy elsewhere.
Provide consumers with a straightforward return policy and customer support system to make this easier. Early in the process, include a clear link to the return policy to ease the minds of your customers when making a purchase.
Browsing
Online shoppers frequently add products to their carts, only to abandon them. Most of the time, clients start the checkout process without knowing enough details about the deal. Also, when users add items to their carts, they may not intend to buy them; instead, they are merely perusing.
It is critical to remember that browsing-related abandonment will never be eliminated. However, by providing customers with product and service information before they add items to their carts, you can minimize the chance that they will abandon their carts. This lowers abandonment because it does not require starting the checkout process to obtain these details. Create a sense of urgency and limited-time promotions to entice these users to buy as soon as possible.
Site not mobile-friendly
With over 50% of online sales occurring on mobile devices, e-commerce businesses that do not have responsive mobile designs are not meeting the needs of their majority of clients.
Give your online store’s mobile design a top priority. Ensure your design is responsive, which means it will function on computers and mobile devices. Standardize the design of your checkout and shopping cart to ensure that customers have a consistent shopping experience across devices.
Comparison shopping
When purchasing online, customers have choices. Customers will browse and compare prices to get the best offers. They will leave your shopping cart empty and choose to do business with your competitor if they discover a better offer elsewhere.
A prospective customer will leave your store if your competitor’s offer is more alluring and includes discount codes or quicker shipping. For this reason, it is beneficial to occasionally check out what your rivals have to offer, particularly during the busiest shopping season.
Why A/B testing is the key to reducing shopping cart abandonment
A/B testing is essential to lowering shopping cart abandonment because there are numerous causes for customers to give up on their carts and several possible solutions.
You must optimize both your shopping cart and checkout experience to reduce shopping cart abandonment, increase successful conversions, and give customers a smooth checkout process for your online store.
Because it is about the customer experience, your checkout procedure is crucial to lowering shopping cart abandonment. To determine whether a change to your store’s design will improve or worsen your current checkout page conversion rate, you can conduct A/B testing.
Making impulsive changes to your shopping cart or online store is never a good idea. To ascertain whether the alterations you make to your checkout page will benefit your company, you must investigate A/B testing. The functionality of your shopping cart depends mainly on this research.
Using a third-party service or some ingenuity on the part of your web team, you can use A/B testing to automatically direct half of your site visitors to one version of the web store and half to the other. You create a copy of your current checkout pages featuring one design change. Once there has been enough testing, examine the reporting data to determine which design produced a higher conversion rate and then apply that checkout procedure to all customers.