Introduction
Every year, ecommerce stores lose $18 billion in sales due to cart abandonment!
Wasn’t this fact about shopping cart abandonment shocking? Yes, it is!
After looking out for ways “How to decrease cart abandonment rate,” being an eCommerce store, you must realize this metric’s importance.
Ecommerce stores must know how to fix it and make changes in their existing website to prevent them from losing opportunities to generate revenue from the online proceeds.
Shopping cart abandonment is a serious issue, and eCommerce stores must resolve it timely, or it can result in a heavy loss in revenue with the increased shopping cart abandonment rate. In this article, we will show you some effective ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase sales.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
The term “Shopping Cart Abandonment” describes what happens when potential customers start the shopping cart checkout process but abandon it before completing the purchase. When a shopper adds any product to the shopping cart but never proceeds with their order, it is considered that the product has been abandoned. Retailers pay careful attention to the shopping cart abandonment rate, one of the most important aspects of online shopping that can affect their revenues.
Let’s have a look at Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate by Industry as per the Statista report –
source: statista
How to Calculate Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?
To calculate the shopping cart abandonment rate, the total number of completed transactions is divided by the total number of transactions initiated. Looking at this rate, we can determine how many users add items to their carts but don’t complete their purchases.
Ecommerce sites should monitor the abandonment rate for their shopping carts since a high rate could indicate a poor customer experience or a faulty sales funnel. Online retailers prioritize optimizing the checkout flow to reduce shopping cart abandonment, leading directly to more sales and revenue.
Why Do Shoppers Abandon Their Carts?
A high Shopping cart abandonment rate is a bad sign for eCommerce stores. The high cart abandonment rate only indicates that there are a lot of snags and issues visitors coming to the website are facing while they’re looking to purchase from the brand’s website.
It can be frustrating for eCommerce store owners to see their customers adding items to their shopping cart after expressing a clear interest in their products. Still, something has prevented them from doing so. Keep reading as we will now look for some of the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment.
Most Common Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment
Lack of Trust/Security Concerns
Online shopping, for many reasons, is considered an unsafe way of purchasing goods/services as people experience fraud and scams while shopping online. It becomes essential for eCommerce store owners to create a sense of trust and security in the mind of their customers.
A reliable and secure website includes a good design, SSL certificate, familiar payment gateway options, trust badges, customer reviews, and testimonials. So eCommerce stores that lack all these important aspects make it hard for customers to trust them, which can ultimately result in Shopping cart abandonment.
Complexity
Customers prefer eCommerce stores with good user interfaces and fewer complex features. Due to a short attention span, online shoppers will only accept a checkout flow that is simple enough and takes time to understand. Websites with complex features and designs can result in customers staying on the website during checkout, resulting in reduced conversions. Reduced conversions lead to a high amount of shopping cart abandonment.
High Shipping Costs
A high shipping cost is one of the reasons buyers abandon shopping carts. Ideally, you should go for websites that offer free shipping. Most buyers likely cancel a purchase if they find that the eCommerce store doesn’t offer free shipping.
In this case, they would shift from a particular brand to its competitors, offering free shipping options on their products/services. Hence the number of shopping cart abandonment will increase with high shipping costs.
Lack of Payment Solutions
Today, we see many companies in the market that offer us payment solutions for people shopping online. With many options available for customers to pay online, they have already set their preferences for the mode of payment. If an eCommerce store doesn’t offer the preferred payment gateway to customers, chances are high that they will abandon their cart during the checkout process.
Longer than expected delivery times
Some e-commerce stores don’t reveal the estimated delivery time once the customer completes the checkout process. Shipping to overseas customers is typically subject to delivery times that vary depending on location.
Hence not revealing the expected delivery times of the products can result in businesses facing the issue of customers abandoning the cart during the checkout process. Also, the long delivery times are major reasons businesses face increasing bounce rates on their eCommerce store.
Absence of Discount/Offers
One of the most popular reasons why people prefer shopping online is the availability of discounts and offers. Customers prefer shopping from websites that offer great discounts and offers on the purchase of products/services. Although offering discounts/offers is such an important aspect of online shopping, many eCommerce stores that need to understand its importance are likely to notice an increased shopping cart abandonment rate.
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How To Decrease Your Abandoned Cart Rate?
After talking enough about the shopping cart abandonment rate and common reasons, it’s time to look for some of the best cart abandonment solutions to help you deal with the cart abandonment rate. Following these solutions, you will surely be able to fix the cart abandonment rate on your eCommerce store.
Use Strong CTAs
One of the best ways to win your customers is to use strong and clear Call-to-action(CTA) buttons. The role of the Call-to-action button is to tell visitors what to do, where they should click, and what to buy.
It leads visitors to your checkout and converts them to customers quickly. It will be easier for shoppers to abandon an offer if it has a clear call to action so that they won’t abandon it. Highlight the next step in the payment process using calls-to-action that will guide the users to understand what steps they need to take during the journey.
Improve Page Load Times
A slow-loading website can have a serious impact on your conversion rates. It is even more difficult for consumers to be patient when shopping online. Your chances of losing a customer increase every second when your website loads slowly.
This phenomenon is true not just of e-commerce websites but of all business websites today, and even visitors will associate the responsiveness of your site with your brand’s overall responsiveness. Hence, optimizing your eCommerce store is one of the important steps you will take to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.
Provide Guest Checkout Option
Many websites offer a mandatory account creation feature that doesn’t allow users to purchase without creating an account on their eCommerce store. Consumers planning to make a one-time purchase may want to avoid creating an account; however, businesses often insist on account creation to retarget customers with emails and boost lead generation.
Although for customers, this can be an extra effort they have to make, and hence they might not even make any purchase. Hence eCommerce stores should provide a guest checkout option that allows them to purchase without creating an account.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
Customers have varied preferences regarding payment options, so retailers must provide them with a choice to appeal to a wider audience. Traditionally, debit and credit card payments have dominated. Still, alternatives like PayPal, Klarna, etc.
Other types of payment options like Buy Now Pay Later, and many more payment options have emerged recently. Customers want to use their preferred payment method, especially if it’s more convenient and means they don’t have to enter their billing information every time they make an online purchase.
If an online store provides limited payment options, chances are high that they can miss on potential sales when a customer abandons their shopping cart when they don’t find the preferred payment method option. Therefore providing multiple payment options is crucial for reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate.
Optimize Your Checkout Process
Just as optimizing a website to load faster for a better experience for the customer is important, optimizing the checkout process is crucial. When customers are in the checkout process with the intent to purchase, a poorly designed checkout interface can deter them.
The major goal of optimizing the checkout process is to minimize distractions and reinforce trust throughout the checkout flow, driving every shopper toward a purchase. Try using psychological triggers like providing limited-period discounts or offers that create a desire in customers when they see it and make a purchase.
Include Trust Badges for Security
One of the best ways to develop trust is to use badges on websites. They guarantee that the details and profiles of shoppers will remain secure. Unlike ordinary badges, trust badges are standards that all businesses that accept credit cards must follow to prevent data breaches involving credit card information.
Trust badges are symbols on websites that confirm that the page is legitimate and that all data is collected securely through a third-party service. These badges help build customers’ confidence in your brand, especially for visitors unfamiliar with your brand; trust badges can increase their confidence in you and also reduce the cart abandonment rate.
Use a Progress Indicator
One of the major aspects that may seem small, but it is very helpful is using a progress indicator that shows the customer where they are in their journey to buy a product/service. Progress bars are a great way to be transparent with your customer’s purchase order status.
One of the major reasons for a progress indicator is to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate, as it helps improve the quality of the checkout process. Not knowing how a customer is in the checkout journey can lead to customers leaving the eCommerce store out of frustration of waiting or not knowing the exact status of their purchase journey. Hence it is better to pay attention to the importance of using the progress indicator on your website.
Abandonment Cart Follow-Up Emails
Abandoned cart retargeting follow-up emails are critical ways to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate. In a study of 500 global brands, 44.1% of abandoned cart emails were opened, and almost 29.9% of the clicks led to a recovered sale. Customers should receive an email reminding them of what’s in their cart if they’ve abandoned carts.
You may wish to include recommendations for complementary items in your email templates, such as accessories or related items. They may have abandoned their cart because they couldn’t find what they wanted, so offering another item with an incentive or discount code in a reminder email might help. You can use catchy abandoned cart email subject lines for abandonment cart recovery and encourage people to sign up for your newsletters or inform them about new products and deals.
Add “Save for Later” Option
Saving carts is one way to let your customers customize their shopping experience. People may abandon carts for a few seconds while considering a purchase, so saving cart details for later makes it easier for them to return later and complete a purchase without selecting items and options again. They can save products manually to customers’ accounts when needed to access them later with the saved carts feature.
It would be really helpful for your store to offer customers the option of saving carts for later while keeping them logged in simultaneously. Creating an account and saving a cart on your website means a visitor trusts your website with their information and will return to complete the order in the future. When customers can save carts for later, they can access them from any device or browser by saving them to their accounts.
Check and Fix Conversion Funnel Leaks
To understand where shoppers drop off, you can map them out using tools like Google’s Advanced Ecommerce Analytics. With a Funnel Visualization Report, you can see what pages shoppers visit at each stage of the funnel and what proportion of them stay there.
Your payment page may suffer from attrition if it has unclear call-to-actions, insufficient payment options, and poor functioning websites. In addition, your funnel reports may reveal illogicalities; for instance, customers may have to leave the shopping cart to sign in, increasing their chances of abandoning the purchase. These insights allow you to adjust the user flow based on these insights.
Collect Customer Feedbacks
It is important for eCommerce store owners to know about issues their customers face while purchasing from your store. Understanding your customer’s pain points while shopping from your eCommerce store is one of the best ways to deal with them. By sending customers a post-purchase survey to determine their feelings about your checkout process.
Also, you can know what they aren’t expecting apart from the snags they have encountered. By fixing all the issues, you can ensure that your shopping cart abandonment rate reduces as the customers will be buying from you.
Wrapping Up the Whole Context
Shopping cart abandonment is an important metric you can take care of by following the suggested ways. The key thing that eCommerce store owners should consider is optimizing their website to provide a great shopping experience. With this, they can increase the trust and confidence of their potential customer in their brand, which will ultimately increase their profits and help them generate high ROI.
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