Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping Cart Abandonment: What Can Help?

Do you know an average e-commerce store loses 75% of its sales to shopping cart abandonment?

This number climbs higher during festivities and the holiday season when the competition in the market skyrockets. Based on a few e-commerce studies, the average shopping cart abandonment is close to 75% and it is frustrating for e-commerce providers and online sellers.

The average cart abandonment rate crosses 69.57% across all industries.
Mobile users have a higher cart abandonment of 86.65%.
All the e-commerce brands lose a whopping $18 billion in sales revenue each year due to shopping cart abandonment.
The extra and hidden costs are the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment.
57% of shoppers said they abandoned their cart as they had to wait for more than 3 seconds to check out. (source)

Shopping cart abandonment is a consistent problem, which haunts e-commerce businesses. Thankfully, there are ways to recover losses. Of course, you cannot recover all your abandoned carts, but you can bring back enough customers to cover your losses.

What is cart abandonment and the primary reasons for it?

Cart abandonment refers to a situation when a website visitor adds items to their cart, but instead of completing the purchase, leaves the website or app. Many types of researches have been done on shopping cart abandonment and all of them suggest that the reasons vary from person to person. Some of the common reasons are:

Extra costs at the stage of checkout.
A New account or sign-in is required.
The checkout process is too long.
Unclear pricing.
Lack of trust because of poor customer experience while buying.

Shopping cart abandonment cannot be stopped completely, but it can be tackled. A few things online sellers can do:

1. Choose a reliable e-commerce platform

First things first.

We are in the era where data leaks and hacks have become so common, therefore, it is important to offer a reliable platform for your customers to shop. When an online retailer or seller establishes an online store, it is important to choose a reliable platform to handle the backend operations.

Choose a platform that is PCI DSS certified, which means the platform meets all the six categories of PCI standards. Besides security, sellers need a platform that guarantees good uptime.

2. Offer customer support and service

Data from Microsoft says that 95% of customers demand customer support while shopping online. It was also found that most of the customers abandon carts due to pre-purchase anxiety. This is where shopping assistance can make the sale for you. Live chats and chatbots can tackle such doubts and concerns of the customers.

3. Optimize for mobile shopping

Mobile commerce accounts for 72.9% of all e-commerce sales. As basic website optimization doesn’t work on mobile phones and mobile shoppers, it is essential to optimize your website according to mobile users. Some of the features sellers need to work on are:

Designing the page for single-handed operations.
Avoiding lengthy checkout pages
Keep CTA buttons big enough to avoid any accidental taps.
Offer auto-fill for information, and so on.

4. Simplifying checkout process

In today’s fast-paced world, who wants to fill those lengthy forms during checkout. In case a retailer asks for more than the required information, the customer is likely to abandon the cart.

The solution – online sellers must keep the checkout process as simple as possible. A simple checkout process will never distract the buyer and he is likely to complete the transaction faster.

Here are some golden rules that will help:

Keep promotional pop-ups away from the checkout page.
Allow for guest check-outs and enable sign-in through social pages.
Show a progress indicator.
Allow for easy cart modification.

5. Offer multiple payment methods

Right from COD to credit cards, and digital wallets, your website must offer everything to customers. Let the customers choose how they want to pay for the order.

Before offering different payment methods, you must know who your target audience is, how would they like to pay for the order, and what is the most preferred payment option?

You must enable multiple payment methods in your store.

6. Monitor and learn from your customers

Keep a check on who is purchasing your products and the feedback shared by those customers. An online seller’s work is ongoing. One needs to improve every day to win the online selling game.

Final word

There is no dearth of options while shopping online. Therefore, an online retailer must have a cart recovery strategy in place from day 1. Through a mix of on-site and off-site marketing efforts, marketers can easily re-engage with these shoppers and bring them to reconsider the purchase.