If you’re an eCommerce website owner, then you must clearly know the term “cart abandonment”. Cart abandonment is one of the biggest disasters for any eCommerce website owner. In fact, this is the most harmful thing that can happen to an eCommerce website. It’s a real nightmare resulting in a loss of sales.
What is cart abandonment?
This is the phenomenon when the visitor adds items to his/her shopping cart, then leaves the site without completing the checkout.
Believe it or not, cart abandonment still endures one of the greatest battles for any digital marketer today even considering the altering, dynamic scenery of the eCommerce sector in general. As a matter of fact, just at the beginning of 2019, the number of global cart abandonment ratings reached an unbelievable 84.24%.
This is a huge value causing vast harm to the website, which one can’t even imagine. Much as this value differs in various circumstances, it’s become a common fact showing the major significance of this big problem. Of course, there’s no main factor resulting in cart abandonment, there are many of them.
The fact remains that these numbers conclusively point out the poor user experience, a crooked purchase funnel, extra fees, and a knotty checkout flow.
Accordingly, if you just take care of improving the user experience, optimizing the checkout process and other lacks in your eCommerce will definitely result in reducing the cart abandonment and even increase your sales.
The point is simple – find the lacks on your website, and improve all the points after analyzing the best strategies for the success of your eCommerce website.
Now let’s just pass to checking the common reasons for cart abandonment and seek strategies that will help decrease cart abandonment and increase your sales.
Main reasons for cart abandonment
Speaking the facts, in the eCommerce industry, there’s a large increase in cart abandonment, hence this is just a natural fallout of the way customers browse through eCommerce websites.
Many of them just do window shopping online, compare the prices, and save pieces to buy later, hence they mostly leave the site not completing any orders. These are exactly the most inevitable cart abandonment cases.
Indeed, recent statistics for abandonment show that about 58.6% of US online customers have abandoned a shopping cart in the last 3 months. And the reason they mostly specify is they were just browsing or they were not ready to buy.
In most such cases, the abandonment takes place even before the customers reach the checkout page. That’s pretty sad.
Let’s discuss the main reasons for cart abandonment we have highlighted in the chart above.
Website speed is a major factor
There’s nothing more harmful to customer experience than a slow-loading website or an app. Low performing website is one of the chief factors of cart abandonment and results in the loss of great sums of money on your online business.
Sometimes it’s too difficult for the customers to pass through the checkout procedure considering the slow load of the site and/or application. Eventually, customers leave the site and abandon their shopping carts.
This is why it’s so important to take care of the website speed, fixing all the possible errors that may be caused on the site. This is something that can insanely harm your sales resulting in the loss of so many potential customers.
Now that we have understood the problems resulting in cart abandonment, let’s check some strategies for avoiding it.
Chat availability
How often are you offered help via a live chat while navigating on a website, or searching for support? I think, very often. Yes, live chats today are a very common means for any website owner to offer help to the customers while they are on the site.
This is the easiest way to show your availability and willingness to assist a customer. Having a contact form or other means of support is pretty important. But the fact remains that the live chat is more effective.
The main reason for live chats being more effective than other contact means is that it’s basically “live”. You ask questions and get answers to them immediately, not having to wait for a day or a couple to get the answer to your requests.
Some live chats use chatbots to make the troubleshooting and help process faster and more automated. But the truth is that customers prefer real assistants who are there to give you specific help for your specific issue.
That’s why it’s so important to not only have a live chat on the website but also make sure you are providing real customer support assistants that will do the job.
Customers do need to be understood and they need to feel that the assistant is really there for the willing to help with any issue appearing in the shopping process on the website.
Provide Guest Checkout
First, we need to clarify what “guest checkout” actually is. This is a checkout method for shoppers allowing them to make the purchase from your eCommerce without having registered on your store or entering any personal details shipping/billing address, etc.
This is actually a great plus to your sales, as most of the shoppers prefer quick shopping without any registration or other complicated processes.
In fact, according to BigCommerce, making shoppers register accounts in online stores greatly increases cart abandonment rates.
This is exactly why providing customers with options to avoid creating accounts and guest checkout faster will promote more sales as this way they will make more purchases than having to register on your site.
Offer help to revert abandoning customers
One of the main reasons for cart abandonment is that sometimes they just don’t find things they were searching for in your store. Sometimes they just need some quality assistance to get through the process easily and finalize their purchases.
This is why it’s super important for you to always be there for your customers whenever they need assistance. Help should be available to the customers via contact details, via live chats or, the most effective means – exit-intent popups.
Showing a help offer to the customer that’s just about to leave the store is the ultimate way of convincing them to get back to your store. Just the moment they are desperately leaving your site, not finding what they needed, a friendly help offer appears as a popup window making them change their mind.
Delivery Timing
The delivery process is the most expected of the customers. All we need, as customers, is to get the ordered items as soon as possible.
The significance of the high speed of the delivery is identified as one of the main reasons for the customers when deciding to make purchases on the online store. Approximately 87% of shoppers insist that this is one of the most important factors to choose this or that eCommerce store for online shopping.
A slow delivery can greatly harm your sales, as customers are very likely to abandon their carts seeing the delivery is going to take more than expected. Clear and timely estimated delivery is extra important for online sales.
In fact, the delivery speed is more important to online shoppers rather than the price of the products they order. That’s just because most of the time, people order items that are needed on certain dates. It can be an anniversary birthday or just seasonal shopping.
Sometimes people are even keen on paying more money to have a faster delivery on the same day or just in a week.
This is why it’s so important to do your best, as an eCommerce owner to make the delivery process as fast as possible.
For this purpose, you may include an Express delivery along with the Standard delivery on your website. This way, the customers who need the items faster, will choose the Express delivery, paying an extra sum to get the items in a shorter time.
Cart Reminder Popups
Another very common type of shopping cart abandonment is when customers add items to their carts. They simply forget about them without finalizing the purchase.
This can be super irritating for an eCommerce owner. The customer is just a step away from making the purchase, then they simply leave, forgetting about the items.
This is a pretty much usual practice along with eCommerce shoppers, and there are facts proving this.
So, according to SaleCycle studies, 75.6% of customers add items to their shopping cart and just leave without completing their purchase. This is a really big number of potential sales losses.
There’s actually a really easy way to fix this for online shop owners. There is a kind of reminder tool for letting customers know about the items they have in their shopping carts. One of the most effective ones is the popup type that shows to the customers depending on their cart value.
Like, you can specify if there is a certain number of products on the cart, the popup should be shown to the customer. This way, the customers will certainly be reminded about the items on their cart. And most likely, they won’t leave without finalizing.
In addition, if there’s a CTA in the popup, like “Complete shopping” in our example, the chances are bigger that the customer will complete purchases. It’s just a one-click action which is a great deal for a customer, saving their time and energy.
Avoid Extra Costs
What do we refer to when speaking about “extra costs” on eCommerce websites? These are the shipping costs, extra fees, VATs, etc. Things can easily push the customers back thus resulting in cart abandonment.
Customers may select a number of products. They will reach the checkout point and just leave without completing exactly because of such factors.
This is why it’s super important to consider such things in your online shop. At least warn customers about such possible charges on the shop before they reach the checkout page.
The best way of not letting customers abandon their shopping carts is to inform customers about every possible extra cost ahead. Just before they reach the checkout.
Free shipping offers are also a great way of avoiding shopping cart abandonment. Offer free shipping on orders that exceed a specific value of the cost of the orders.
This will not only reduce the cart abandonment rates on your online store but also increase the average order numbers on your eCommerce store.
According to HubSpot studies, 24% of customers are more likely to spend more money buying more stuff. Just to reach the number for getting the orders with free shipping. This is why it’s just a perfect way to increase the average order numbers in your store.
Keeping the trick with cart reminder popups, you can offer free shipping to the customers. When a certain number of items are added to the cart, reaching the specified amount.
Or in another scenario, the amount is not enough for the free shipping. Here you show another popup informing the customer about that. So that they will add more items to reach the amount for free shipping.
Exit Intent Conversion
We have already discussed the effectiveness of exit-intent popups. The way they are in reducing the shopping cart abandonment with the help of contact forms.
But there’s another use case for the brilliant exit-intent triggering. Sales offers. This is some magic that can keep any customer on the website and convince them to make shopping in your store.
Just a simple popup offering a coupon for a discount on the products offered in the store, and you own the customer’s heart.
Discounts are some magical tools that can promote more sales among your customers. Even a little discount can keep a customer from abandoning the cart on your eCommerce.
A coupon exit-intent popup will not only reduce shopping cart abandonment. It will also increase the conversion rates on your website.
You will have three bonuses at the same time – reduce the shopping cart abandonment rates, increase the conversion rates, and sell more items in your store!
Newsletter Connection
E-mail marketing today is becoming more and more popular for eCommerce (and not only) websites. Newsletter e-mails are one of the best ways of keeping a connection with your customers.
It’s a perfect way of informing about any type of news in your store, including new collections, sales, and more.
When collecting subscriber lists for your campaigns, you should never forget about your old customers. The ones who have become loyal members of your shopping company.
Use special targeting e-mail campaigns for your loyal customers, offering special deals to them. Let them know you appreciate their loyalty and you are thankful to them for staying your customers.
Never forget and underestimate your old customers while you are busy collecting new customers and selling more stuff. Make sure they receive the earned attention. As you have most of your sales it’s due to their loyalty to true customers.
Keep It Simple
Website navigation is one of the most important things any website owner should care about. Every element/content on your website should be easy to find for the customers.
One of the best things for making website navigation easier is breadcrumbs. By “breadcrumbs” we don’t mean the sliced residue of dry bread, of course. 🙂
A breadcrumb is a small text path that is mostly placed at the top of a website showing where the user is on the site. To be clearer, it’s just a bar showing the path of the user’s navigation on the website.
The good thing about breadcrumbs is that every step of the path is clickable. So a user can easily get all the way back to the homepage. Something like in the image below:
The complicated checkout process is another frustrating factor that can affect the conversion rates on your website. Keep it simple and clear, if you really want to sell the items on your eCommerce shop.
Don’t include too many elements on one page without any legitimate layout plan. It can be super frustrating for your customers. It can result in an actual abandonment, as they will leave the site without completing the purchases.
This can as well result in returning sales. As these customers are not likely to come back to your store again.
Just make sure to make the checkout process as simple as possible. This will greatly help your sales growth.