How to Reduce Ecommerce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment describes a process whereby shoppers browse your website and add items to their shopping basket, but then leave without completing your checkout process or buying any products. It is an important business metric because it directly impacts your ecommerce conversion rate and thus sales revenue.

How to Calculate Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

The shopping cart abandonment rate formula is:

(1 – (Total completed transactions / Shopping carts created))× 100

That means if 500 website visitors purchase from your store in a month but there were 4,000 shopping carts created over that same period, the calculation would be:

(1 – (500 / 4,000))× 100 = 87.5%

As such, your shopping cart abandonment rate would be 87.5% using the data above.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2021

Some interesting abandoned cart statistics are provided below:

• The worldwide shopping cart abandonment rate is approximately 75%.
• The shopping cart abandonment rate on mobile devices is approximately 85%.
• Abandoned shopping carts cost marketers $2 trillion – $4 trillion annually.
• Over 60% of shoppers will abandon a shopping cart because of an extra cost.
• 35% of shopping carts are abandoned because a buyer has to create an account to complete checkout.

There are many factors that influence shopping cart abandonment, including long or confusing checkouts, unreasonably high shipping costs, and payment security concerns. Read on for some useful guidance on minimising your shopping cart abandonment rates and boosting your sales revenue.

Improve Site Speed

Your website’s page loading times directly impacts your conversion rates. Simply put, the faster your site speed, the more likely customers are to purchase your products and reduce shopping cart abandonment. Here are a few website loading time statistics, which drive this point home:

• Website conversion rates drop by over 4% for every additional second that the page takes to load (between 0 and 5 seconds).
• Almost 70% of customers state that site speed impacts their buying decision-making process online.
• The highest ecommerce conversion rates take place on pages that take between 0 and 2 seconds to load.
• The first 5 seconds of page load time have the biggest impact on conversion rates.

Add Progress Monitors to Your Checkout Process

Progress monitors are visual indicators on a customer’s journey through the checkout process. This helps to discourage cart abandonment, and so improve online store conversion rates, in several ways:

• You remove any worry that the process will take more time than they are willing to commit.
• It assures customers that they are near the end of the process and thus encourages them to complete the purchase.
• It reminds them that they have already invested a certain amount of time in the purchase.This then acts as a psychological push to finish the process, rather than having wasted this time.

Provide User-Friendly, Intuitive Navigation

Another effective way of improving your abandoned cart conversion rate is by optimising your site navigation. Your customers want to find what they are looking for effortlessly. They then want to buy their items and leave in as little time as possible. The harder any of this is for them, the more likely they are to abandon their cart and look elsewhere.

Accordingly, make sure it’s the height of simplicity for your customers to find and purchase products. Consider adding the functionality for people to purchase items straight from product pages. This will reduce the number of clicks it takes to complete the transaction, making the process quicker and easier.

Clearly Signpost All Costs Upfront

When customers realise they have incurred additional costs to their order midway through the checkout, they often re-evaluate their purchase. Sometimes they may even feel like they are being scammed. This can be a major cause of shopping cart abandonment.

To avoid this happening, make sure that you have clearly stated all costs upfront. This includes shopping fees, booking fees, tax, and any other costs. Knowing the full fee in advance makes it more likely that the customer will complete the purchase.

Produce Shoppable Content

Another way to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates is to enable people to buy directly from your content. As important a strategy as traditional content marketing is, generating direct sales from it is difficult. This is due to the many steps in between a consumer reading your blog to pressing ‘purchase’to checkout. However, allowing people to buy straight from the content solves this problem. In so doing, consumers can purchase your products the moment they come across them in your content marketing.

Give the Option for Guest Checkout

Making it a requirement for site visitors to create a user account before purchasingcan significantly raise your average abandoned cart rate. It becomes more difficult to buy your items and acts as a deterrent. Instead, offer visitors the option to checkout quickly and easily as a guest to increase your conversions.

Provide Live Chat Support

Customers shopping in brick-and-mortar stores are able to call on the staff working there for guidance. Importantly, this is a benefit you can also offer to customers visiting your e-store. By offering live chat support on your website, site visitors can experience this same level of customer care. You can even use cart abandonment data to identify particular trouble spots in the checkout process. This will allow you to target these areas specifically, and further improve your conversion rates.

Accept Multiple Payment Types

As previously stated, a key part of reducing shopping cart abandonment is removing obstacles to customers making a purchase. One such obstacle is only accepting one, or very few, payment methods. Consumers today use multiple means of payment, such as credit cards, PayPal, and mobile payment systems like Apple Pay. The more of these you accept, the lower your shopping cart abandonment rates will be.

Make Effective Use of CTAs(Calls to Action)

It’s vital to include compelling CTAs in your checkout process. This is a strategy that ecommerce experts agree will effectively help tackle shopping cart abandonment. Place bold, clear CTAs that alleviate doubt and encourage customers to finalise their purchase.

However, remember to maintain a consistent and cohesive tone across your website’s messaging. If the CTAs in your checkout are a sudden departure from the established style of your website, this may be off-putting to some prospects.

Optimise Your Store for Mobile

It is projected that 72% of ecommerce will be generated via mobiles this year. Additionally, this trend of growing mobile use shows no sign of abating. This makes it vital for ecommerce vendors to optimise their checkouts for mobile devices. To do this, ensure that all pages are mobile responsive, images are an appropriate size, and your end-to-end website setup is easy to navigate.

Include Quality, Interactive Images

Today’s consumers have certain image expectations when shopping online. As a rule of thumb brands must display high quality pictures in different styles and from multiple angles. Doing so enhances the customer’s perception of your products and brand, which can help to reduce abandoned carts and boost conversions.

Do Not Run Out of Stock

Customers may find it frustrating when they reach checkout only to find that a product is out of stock. If they were planning on buying multiple items, this may dissuade them from purchasing the other items in their cart. Put a lot of effort into meeting demand for your products.

When stock is unavoidably running low, send reminder emails to customers who have these items in their shopping cart. This will both manage expectations while also spurring them on to complete their purchase.

Offer Coupons, Deals, And Discounts

Providing discount offers can be an effective way of reducing cart abandonment. For example, over 88% of consumers in the US use coupons. This demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of people can be influenced in some way through this type of approach. Add clever advertising to the mix to really maximise awareness and take advantage of all the benefits coupons, deals, and discounts have to offer.

Employ Marketing Strategies to Reduce Abandonment

There are many marketing techniques you can use to increase sales.This includes:

• Personalised reminder emails for customers who have left their carts.
• Retargeting prospects who have abandoned carts with relevant ads.
• Using social proof such as customer reviews and testimonials.
• Employing exit-intent pop-ups to establish why customers are leaving their carts. These can also be used to offer targeted discounts.

1. Analyse Customer Behaviour to Identify Conversion Funnel Leaks

   You can utilise a range of sophisticated tools to lower ecommerce shopping cart abandonment rates. Apps such as Google’s Advanced Ecommerce Analytics allow you to discern precisely where users are leaving your site. For example, high drop-off rates on the payment page may indicate that you need to accept more payment methods or optimise the page for mobile users.

2. Gather Data from Customers About Specific Pain Points

   Collecting data can be the key to unlocking lower abandonment rates. Accordingly, it is wise to ask your site visitors (including purchasers and cart abandoners) about their experiences. Drill down into the checkout process and find out what’s putting them off.

   This kind of direct customer feedback can highlight issues that analytics software may fail to identify. For even more meaningful data, incorporate open-ended questions for further insight into customer decision-making.

3. Run A/B Testing on Your Site

   Once you’ve identified the problems through the preceding steps, you can then work on rectifying them. As such, you must evaluate your efforts to measure theeffectiveness. The best way of doing this is through A/B testing.

A/B testing involves introducing a change to your websiteand sending half of yourvisitors to the updated page. This enables you to compare how it performs against the original page. If you can see an improvement in cart abandonment figures, then you can switch to only using the new page layout. You can do this to test different layouts, designs, colour schemes, passages of copy, or any other page element. However, only change one thing at a time, so that you can be sure of what is influencing the different performance.

Decreasing shopping cart abandonment rates is an ongoing process.It requires constant effort and vigilance.Frequent testing and experimentation must be undertaken to identifythe factors that produce thebest results. Regular improvements then need to be made, in light of these findings.

At Vsourz, our team of ecommerce experts can undertake this important task for your business. Our consultants can help you build trust and credibility with your customers to boost conversions and revenue.