Cart Abandonment is a commonly observed occurrence. If you are a business owner, then you must have experienced it, too. Even if customers do not return to finish a purchase, understanding why they left can assist companies in lowering future abandonment rates.
In this article, we learn more about the issue of cart abandonment along with the following topics:
- Shopping cart abandonment and ways to stop and improve it.
- Effects of an abandoned online shopping cart on the business.
- Communicating the cart to the customer through Email.
- We shall also learn about a good shopping cart abandonment rate.
- What is a good abandoned cart recovery rate?
- We also get to see why exactly is cart abandonment considered so bad.
- Finally, we discuss the 20 actions you can take to reduce cart abandonment.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
When a prospective buyer enters an eCommerce website, adds a few products to the shopping cart, and then leaves without completing the transaction, this is known as shopping cart abandonment. The shopper is considered to have abandoned products that have been placed in the shopping basket but not purchased.
Shopping cart abandonment has little to do with or is not based on the website's presence or the offers that appear in adverts. No amount of Giving away additional goodies will not solve the problem of cart abandonment. This necessitates a thorough examination of why users are leaving the website despite clearly loving the offerings.
How Do I Stop a Shopping Cart Abandonment?
When people are out shopping at a supermarket or a mall, the chances of them getting distracted by something happening outside the mall are negligible. However, in the realm of eCommerce, this goes on all the time. Despite your best efforts, consumers come to your site, begin buying, then close the browser to view the latest movie trailers, never to return.
Shopping cart abandonment is what it's all about. When customers add an item or product to a website's shopping cart but depart before completing the sale, this is known as shopping cart abandonment.
Amongst the most difficult issues for online retailers to solve is shopping cart abandonment. That said, improving your eCommerce experience to prevent and battle shopping cart abandonment is certainly not difficult, and in this piece, we'll look at some of the best strategies to achieve just that.
Maintaining Complete Transparency with Costs
Customers are less likely to be caught unaware by an unannounced rise in prices if you disclose all prices beforehand. This includes any shipping expenses, applicable taxes, and every other expense they should expect. Therefore, it is always a good practice to maintain cost transparency with potential buyers to avoid abandonment.
Introducing Progress Indicators on Checkout
Users may like to see where they are in the checkout process and how far they have to go. You could ease up the process for them by introducing a progress indicator. An almost finished progress bar is an indication or a visual cue for customers to encourage completion of their purchase. If customers see what else they've already spent in your checkout, they might be even more encouraged to complete their transaction.
Including Representations of Products
Including thumbnails, previews, or images of products in the checkout process can help buyers feel more confident about their current purchase. This way, they can access all information about the selected products throughout the process. Customers can see and feel the item they're buying when they make a purchase in person, which they can't do with an online transaction. Product thumbnails are particularly helpful for keeping these items in the sight all through the process.
Simplify Navigation around the Website
If you want to see your customers effectively purchase and complete the transaction, it is essential to make it simple to move between the cart and the store. The more work you put in for your customers, the less likely they are to purchase the items in their shopping carts. Customers want to be able to rapidly add things to their shopping carts and return to browsing the rest of the inventory.
To reduce the number of clicks and page views required to complete a transaction, some shops have made it feasible for customers to checkout directly from the product page. Therefore, make it simple for your consumers to add products to their carts and return them to the checkout page when they're ready to purchase.
Improving Page Load Speed
Work on optimizing your page load speed. A swiftly loading page might meet your customers' desire for a quick checkout process. Customers will be happier, and they will be more likely to purchase additional things from your website. This helps them save time and they do not have to stay longer.
Offering the Option of Guest-Checkout
Imposing account creation could turn off the new customers. Therefore, it would be great to offer the option to check out as a guest to ensure that no potential consumers are turned away. Instead of mandatory account creation, you can ask customers to keep their checkout details on the confirmation page. This could facilitate if you wish to collect contact information for advertising purposes.
Providing live chat assistance
By incorporating customer assistance alternatives into your checkout sequence, you can duplicate this same degree of care and attention. Identify regions where customers are more likely to abandon carts using cart abandonment data.
Shopping in-store has the additional option of allowing you accessibility to pleasant employees eager to assist you in finding things or answer your questions. Therefore, identifying regions where there are probabilities to abandon carts using cart abandonment data would be very beneficial. Moreover, this allows the customers to interact with a customer service representative to minimize abandonment.
Enhancing Security Settings
Displaying essential security indicators and seals throughout the process is one method to increase customer confidence in your platform. Displaying security marks can convince customers that their information and profile will be kept safe all the way through the purchasing process. When customers disclose confidential data like their credit card number and mailing address, they want to ensure that your site is safe.
Providing a variety of payment choices
Having only one payment option might create unneeded barriers. Internet banking, digital wallets, and credit cards are just a few of the payment alternatives available to today's buyers. Supporting the most popular payment methods ensures you don't turn away potential clients. Actually allow customers to purchase products with a high using customer financing alternatives.
Ensuring a robust refund and return policy in place
Customers will feel more secure when they purchase things from your store if you have a good return policy. Return policies are crucial in eCommerce because customers do not have the option of trying on things or viewing them in person.
How to Calculate the Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?
E-commerce retailers may compute and track their cart abandonment rate to figure out what's causing their income to rise or fall. This aids in determining the percentage of potential customers with purchase intent who do not complete a transaction despite having items in their cart.
Calculate the Cart Abandonment Rate by dividing the number of finished purchases by the total number of shopping carts formed. For the desertion rate, subtract the result from one and multiply by 100.
The formula for the same is given by:
How can I Improve My Abandonment Cart?
You will likely encounter situations where the customers will almost certainly abandon their shopping carts on your website. We shall look at ways so that you'll be able to attract back these customers and persuade them to reconsider buying a product using a combination of off-site and on-site marketing tactics.
Reasons for exit pop-ups
When clients abandon their cart, activate a feedback system. These exit intent pop-ups might be used to explain why users are abandoning their carts or to highlight a promotional price. A discount code for a percentage off can sometimes be all that's required to persuade your customers to complete the purchase. It would be great to have a little popup that auto-fills with the item they are leaving behind in their shopping cart as the user is ready to dismiss the window or switch to a different tab.
Plan Retargeting for the Customers who abandoned
The idea is to remind your customers about the things they left in their shopping cart, which will encourage them to make a purchase. Retargeting cart abandoners with targeted ads keep the products they looked at or added to their cart fresh in their minds. This is important because before committing to a purchase, some customers demand many interactions. So, retargeting is a good option if you wish to get them back to proceed with the purchase.
Tailored Follow-up emails to meet the customer requirements
Sending follow-up e-mails is a good way to remind customers that they haven't finished their transaction. It also allows them to resume where they left off. Therefore, cart recovery emails should be sent to clients after a checkout abandonment. Consider creating a link that leads them back to the precise point where they were before they left. This will help to speed up the process. Offering a small discount is another effective strategy to encourage customers to return to your store.
Use social evidence to your advantage
To help express the value of your items, including testimonies from other pleased customers and reviews of individual products on product pages. So, This could be another strategy you may employ to get customers to proceed to buy.
Effects of Online Shopping Cart Abandonment
Let's take a deeper look at how cart abandonment affects specific businesses:
Shortage or Unavailability of a product
We are aware that bots load up carts with all the products right at the outset of a sale during periods of special deals and discounts. This depicts a lowered level of inventory and makes certain things unavailable to legitimate customers. These high-intent customers may instead shop at competitors' websites, which has an effect on sales of the business of the given website.
Impacts Conversion Rates
Reduced conversion rates may cause business owners to assume that their existing pricing and marketing techniques aren't working. This also prompts them to boost their financial and effort inputs in order to appear more successful.
Reduced ad CTR
When bots visit retailing sites and add items to shopping carts, they leave behind cookie traces that trick marketers and ad networks. They then deliver tailored advertising that actual people would never see. These bogus leads are a costly affair that could have been better spent on reaching out to qualified prospects.
Revenue Loss
Legitimate buyers will be unable to make purchases as long as bots continue to fill carts, resulting in a distorted relationship between conversion rate and the cost of gaining customers through sponsored promotions and larger incentives. This will eventually lead to a revenue loss.
Distorted Website Data
Bot visits drastically skew site metrics, making it difficult to tell if site statistics panels show real visitors or bot-generated data. This negatively impacts KPIs, lead metrics, conversion rates, Advertisement ROI. All these factors get affected as they are dependent on the website analytics.
Time and Effort Wastage
High bot traffic during peak shopping days will definitely require IT personnel to work long hours and put in a lot of effort to resolve the issues that bots cause.
Emailing an Abandoned Cart
You may often come across an abandoned cart and now, you want to reach out to that customer and persuade them to go ahead with the purchasing. This can be effectively achieved through emails and email marketing. Such emails are called abandoned cart emails. You must recognize that customers frequently abandon their carts unintentionally, which may be due to the website failing, a complex process, or due to the site timing out.
Abandoned cart emails can be really easy to set up and are by far an underutilized tactic.
Here are the top 5 guidelines for an effective cart recovery email:
1) Including Images of the cart products
2) Policy details on return/exchange
3) Testimonials and ratings provided by other consumers
4) Full price, including delivery expenses for the product
5) A clear button for call-to-action connecting to the cart
Despite these points, how will you ensure that the target customer reads your mail? For that, you will need to work on making your emails stand out. You can achieve that through the following tips:
Maintain an Intriguing Subject Line
With a reader receiving an average of 120 emails daily, the average opening rate is around 15%. Simply put, the number of mails they would read is just 20 emails per day. In such a scenario, your intriguing subject line makes it inquisitive for the user to open the mail. This is your first step towards success with the abandoned cart email.
Describing the Product in various ways
There are times when the customer does not know how to use the product; Or sometimes, a shopper doesn't know what to put along with any outfit and finally leaves the basket. The catalyst which transforms the shopper can be the personalized styling options based on the customer's style profile. You can introduce something like, “The same garment can be designed in various ways as illustrated”. In addition to helping the cart to recover, an email with several stylistic alternatives can boost the cart’s capacity.
Display Related Products
When one consumer opens the email, he must be encouraged to return and finish the process. Although the customer might have liked that item in the cart, they may want to see more of such products style. In this scenario, a section that says, "Here's more" or "You may also like" can be really helpful. This allows the consumer to select a different version that is visually similar to the goods in the cart, which is comparable to how it browsed.
Offer Discounts and Concessions on Purchases
As the products are already in the cart, shoppers need not be persuaded about the product's value. The tiny customized discount will be a long way to converting buyers instead of having great discounts on many things on the website. You only need a modest boost and you may even offer a small discount.
Must-Haves in an Abandoned cart Email
The hesitant customer can be encouraged into the purchasing process through a great email tact. We shall see the 2 must-haves in an abandoned cart email.
Reminding Them About What’s Left in their Cart
It may take several hours after the objects have been abandoned for them to remember what they saw in them in the first place. This is a warm lead, as opposed to the frigid reach of a normal business email structure. It's possible that after some time has passed, your buyers will decide that they still want to buy.
You may also like to consider the reasons why the cart was abandoned after all. The research shows that around 25% of customers blame website crashes. So, looking into the other factors which lead to an incomplete purchase would give you an insight into measures to take for improving the situation. Moreover, a typical business format email does not look appealing and warm enough to get the customer to move back to the shopping cart
Let’s look at some of the finest examples of emails that you could adopt to communicate.
Let’s look at another example that is slightly better than the last one, yet simple.
We move on to another simple and yet, very appealing email.
We can quickly collect a few important points here. Look at the stylish font, the color schemes, the central-aligned picture of the product, and of course, the links. The email has 3 active links that take you back to the cart directly, without having to go through any other pages. The links are the title of the mail, the image itself, and the blue button at the bottom.
Having looked through the first option, let’s learn about the other way you could enhance your emails.
Having a Great Copy
You can take the third example above as a good illustration of displaying a great copy.
Sending a great copy is probably a feature that allows you to make the most of the abandoned cart emails. Taking this as an opportunity, you must give it your best shot and make it more appealing and attractive.
You could use any of these to make a great copy:
- A great subject line that is very catchy
- Great copy
- Adding pleasant images
Let’s look at an example of a great copy.
Here, xyzclothing.com is experimenting adventurously and it might turn out rather well in the end for them.
They have a subject line that says, “ Why did you leave?”, with a sad pup image. Now, you should notice that the clothing line has nothing to do with the pup or dogs at all. However, isn’t this a great copy that is not only appealing textually and has a great catchy image but also provides the relevant link to take the customer right at the cart?
You may also add a “Happy to Help You” or “What can we do for you?” to enhance the value of the email.
What is a Good Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?
The rate or the percentage of the shoppers who add goods to the shopping cart but then abandon it and move out is called the shopping cart abandonment rate.
It is fundamentally, a display of the percentage of the interested people who come but leave without making a purchase to the total number of creates carts.
Why is the Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Critical?
The shopping cart abandonment rate allows e-commerce websites to assess their visitor’s and clients' actions. The cart abandonment rate is a more explicit indication of why sales can rise and fall at the rate of shopping cart abdication. Especially, it might reveal where a snag can occur in the process of conversion of online clients. Reducing the abandonment rate is an excellent strategy to improve revenue immediately.
For online shops, the typical shopping cart drop rate is from 60% to 80%. The average is 71.4%. The globally optimal check-out procedure is reported to have a 20% abandonment rate.
What is a Good Abandoned Cart Recovery Rate?
Cartridge e-mails are very individualized, but in the end, like any other communication, you will measure them in your digital marketing campaign. You will see the essential indicators you should track in your ESP dashboard.
You will need to consider the CTR and click-to-open rate and work closely on these aspects. We understand that the cart abandonment e-mails are above 10 percent converted. This indicates that a higher open rate and click rate compared to traditional marketing messages can also be expected.
It is good to understand the average cart abandonment conversion rate as it helps to estimate if your work is successful with customer retention. A higher conversion rate implies that your efforts are paying off. However, if your conversion rate is low or if you do not get a convert for every 10 emails that you send, then you need to work on your strategy. It is time to think deeply and look closely at the reasons why things haven’t turned out the way they should have.
While most retailers come to terms with the issues of cart abandonment (which is about 72%), there’s good news for them; and that is that about 63% of it is actually recoverable.
Why is Cart Abandonment so Bad?
While there was an initial reluctance for the retailers for the eCommerce; however, the conflict between retail and e-commerce is now understood and largely resolved. Moreover, eCommerce is not the aspect that retailers need to fear anymore, whether online or offline.
Also, in the past, there have been examples of many eCommerce businesses folding due to rigidity and flexibility issues.
Physical shops and online businesses have their own advantages and disadvantages. E-commerce, for example, allows customers the comfort of sitting and purchasing without having to move. Yet, retail delivers a tactile experience that websites cannot reproduce on eCommerce.
But eCommerce websites have a particular challenge that is usually never faced by shops. This is known as an abandoned shopping cart.
Abandoned carts have a major influence on the company's throughput. These are shoppers who have been interested in the product but for certain reasons have abandoned their carts; most of which can be avoided with appropriate methods.
For numerous reasons, abandoning shopping carts is a concern for retailers.
- Charging carts and giving them up might lead to unavailability and loss of income for legitimate consumers.
- If you experience a high cart loss rate, then you will need to assess and change the marketing and pricing methods.
- Customers who insert and abandon things into their cart impose heavy stress on servers that slow down the website and provide genuine customers with a bad UX.
20 Actions You can take to Reduce Cart Abandonment
This section talks about the 20 top ways to reduce cart abandonment.
- Shipping Terms and Other details: Highlighting the shipping terms is essential to your customers. You must clearly mention the shipping terms even if you don’t ship free. This will assure your customers of the total expenses they would be making in the process. Moreover, this also works to remove anxiety and generate more sales.
- Quick loading web pages: Make sure every page on your site loads quickly to avoid irritating potential customers. Choosing a performance-optimized hosting service or enabling browser caching are some of the measures you could look at to improve the page loading speed.
- Clear Return Policy: Make your return policy prominent to keep away any lurking doubts and fears among your customers. A clearly mentioned return policy goes a long way in building trust in your customer base.
- Remarkable Marketing and Sales Strategy: You have to work on your marketing such that it provides ample reasons to your customers to make a purchase there and then.
- Showcase Advantages: Drive home the benefits of shopping with you. Prioritize the content that appears on the front page of your website based on the interests of the customers. Once they know they can avail of all the things they want at your E-store, they will lose their desire to look elsewhere.
- Outstanding Customer Service: Provide chat or phone help that’s available to your customers 24/7. This way, they would be reassured of the service and of getting answers to all their queries. Through around-the-clock customer service, you can also make it possible for them to place the orders as soon as their concerns are addressed.
- Explicitly mentioned Contact Information: Show contact information plainly on every page to build trust. Establish the fact that your team is all set and available to them at any time of the day for any help conceivable.
- Reviews, Ratings, and Testimonials: Use testimonials and reviews abundantly as social media proof of why doing business with you is an excellent idea. This is an excellent way of telling your clients why they should trust you. As a retailer, you must understand, that the customers would trust other customers’ testimonials and ratings more than what you would tell them probably.
- Clear Directions: Present your website in a clearly directed format so that they know where would a particular link take them. This also holds true for the CTAs which should be exceedingly clear to avoid confusing and losing prospective buyers.
- Plenty of Payment Options: Providing plenty of online payment options to your clients is again a very welcoming signal to them. A customer may have only a few online payment options available at his end. So, this would be an added advantage if you provide them with multiple payment options like PayPal, Google Pay, and stop them from turning away.
- Leverage one-click shopping for repeat customers: This helps to make it even easier for them to keep buying from you. These customers certainly had a very good experience the previous time and therefore, they are here again. So, why not make it easier for them to shop with you?
- Informative Error Messages: Make sure your error messages are helpful and friendly to prevent shoppers from perceiving your customer service as rude and uncaring. Work on your content to make it seem customer-friendly and let them know at each step that you care.
- Auditing checkout process: Audit the entire checkout procedure to maximize conversions. This process needs a meticulous strategy so that you do not end up with an abandoned cart despite the customer seeming interested in buying. Ensure that the whole check-out process works smoothly and gives them a good feel for being at your store.
- Simplifying: Make it easy for shoppers to make changes to the cart in order to prevent frustration and keep them engaged. Work with your website builder to ease the process of modifying the cart contents. A smooth shopping process will keep the customers happy, which in turn raises the chances of them moving ahead with the purchase.
- Seals of Trust: Display seals of trust and use secure transaction methods so shoppers will feel safe when they provide their payment information. All over your website, you can use logos and signs of the companies you have engaged to facilitate online payment. Doing so will not only simplify the procedure but will also lead to customers trusting you even more.
- No Distractions: Don’t give them reasons to get distracted and abandon their carts to increase the likelihood of getting the order. This can be achieved easily by making each page of your website lively and rich in content. Highlight the best you have for them with each click. The idea is to keep them interested throughout the process so they do not lose their way.
- Surprises: Make all surprises good surprises. This refers to all the ways in which you believe your clients could become happy. For example, offering a discount once the goods cross a certain value or offer free shipping on a certain value.
- Registration Relief: If your visitors have to sign up before checking out, then this may be detrimental to your business. Allow them to sign out as guests and make them happy. This not only helps them save time but will also help your business as they may keep coming back due to an eased mechanism.
- Letting them know where they are in the process: Label and number each step and use graphic representations to indicate how far they have come, before they finally checkout.
- Target to enhance the overall customer experience: While the customer stays on your website, ensure that they do not have any hindrances and are kept engaged and engrossed with your offerings. Keep a close watch on each of the processes that are responsible for ensuring a purchase. A long as the visitor is happy with what is being provided, they would not go anywhere else.
How can Deskera Help You with Reducing Online Shopping Cart Abandonment?
As discussed in detail in this post, we now know that the factors like good email marketing, a luminous social media presence help greatly in customer retention. Deskera can guide you on the way to a successful online business with its exceptional email marketing strategies and its email marketing guides.
Take home some of the best sales tips with Deskera’s sales psychology guide and get an insight into the sales cycle.
Besides, you may also want to take a look at other financial aspects of your business such as accounting, inventory management, invoice management system and also learn in detail about CRM. You may also learn about the email marketing compliances
Key Takeaways
Based on our observations and learning from the article, let’s summarize the key points here:
- When a prospective buyer enters an eCommerce website, adds a few products to the shopping cart, and then leaves without completing the transaction, this is known as shopping cart abandonment.
- Online merchants must continue to focus on excellent buying experiences to convert shoppers into paying customers in today's observation-driven environment.
- Maintaining Complete Transparency, Introducing Progress Indicators, Representations of Products are some of the ways to stop cart abandonment.
- Ecommerce retailers may compute and track their cart abandonment rate to figure out what's causing their income to rise or fall.
- Using social evidence, follow-up emails are some of the methods to combat car abandonment.
- Unavailability of a product, Reduced ad CTR, and Revenue loss are the side effects of cart abandonment.
- Including Images, return Policy details, Testimonials, and a CTA are the effective ways of writing an abandoned cart email.
- For online shops, the typical shopping cart drop rate is from 60% to 80%.
- The globally optimal check-out procedure is reported to have a 20% abandonment rate.
