Abandoned shopping carts are what happens when a potential customer starts the checkout process but doesn’t complete the purchase. When a customer adds an item to the cart but doesn’t purchase it, it is abandoned. Customers can abandon shopping carts for multiple reasons. We’re going to share the most common reasons people continue to abandon online shopping carts and what to do to combat them.
Why Should I Care About Abandoned Shopping Carts?
The abandoned shopping cart rate is an important metric for e-commerce websites. To calculate your abandoned shopping cart rate divide the total number of completed transactions by the total number of transactions that were initiated. If this rate is high, it could signify bigger issues. For example, poor user experience or a broken sales funnel.
Why Customers Abandon Their Online Shopping Carts
Customers abandon their online shopping carts for several reasons:
- Lack of trust – Prospective clients can be wary about providing their credit information to a new company or platform.
- Shipping costs – Customers can get sticker shock after seeing their total with shipping.
- Poor user experience – If the checkout process is too complex or time-consuming, the online shopper will give up.
- Lack of payment options – Customers have their preferred payment methods, and if your checkout doesn’t include it, then customers don’t have a reason to trust a new company.
- Technical problems – Technical issues and glitches can cause frustration with customers which can prompt them to abandon the cart.
Need help analyzing why your e-commerce website has abandoned online shopping carts? Book a call today!
How To Fix Your Abandoned Online Shopping Carts?
To first discover how to fix the problem, you must identify the problem. By using analytics, you can create several hypotheses for why online shopping carts are being abandoned. Then create multiple solutions to solve it. One example is the potential customer doesn’t trust the company. The solution for the lack of trust then could be adding testimonials, featuring pictures of people with the product, adding trust seals, etc. All those work to counteract the theory that customers don’t trust an unfamiliar company. But that’s just several solutions to one theory.
When you reduce your abandonment rate, you get more sales and revenue. This is something every company wants. Here are ways to stop customers from abandoning their online shopping cart:
- Increase the user experience
- Include reviews and testimonials to generate trust with the potential customers
- Feature pictures of real people who have bought the product or service
- Offer a money-back guarantee or a generous return policy if the customer isn’t satisfied with the purchase
- Add a progress bar to visually show shoppers where they are in the checkout process
- Offer a limited-time discount to motivate shoppers to complete the purchase
- Use A/B testing to try different methods of fixing the rate
- Offer free shipping promos
- Offering popular payment methods like PayPal or Afterpay
Recovery Through Email and Data
Those are some solutions you can integrate into your website. There are also two methods to try via email and data to recover the abandoned online shopping cart. The first is sending an email to the potential customer that their item is still waiting in the cart. It’s common to offer a discount to try to re-engage potential customers. The second option is using data in a retargeting ad. To utilize this one, you need a pixel installed on your checkout page. The data from the pixel can be used on Facebook and Google to retarget prospective customers. The second option doesn’t require an email like the first one does, but does require the pixel.
Decrease your online shopping cart abandonment rate with Digital Nomad Designs! We specialize in e-commerce stores to improve your user experience and decrease your abandonment rate. Book a call today!
