7 Proven Tips to Combat Cart Abandonment

At a time when eCommerce is increasingly overriding traditional ways of shopping, it seems that there is still one important point where brick-and-mortar stores have an advantage – they don’t face cart abandonment problems. If you think about it, it really is a rare case that someone leaves a full cart at the cash register in a brick-and-mortar store, but then why it happens so often in the online world? There could be many reasons behind it, and here we’ll propose some of the ways by which you can combat this occurrence.

One of the most frequent problems which eCommerce needs to overcome is cart abandonment. Simply said, this means that potential customers go all the way through the searching and ordering process, only to leave it unfinished at the end. The items are being put in the shopping cart, and then the customer just leaves, for probably not coming back again. If you are not one of those people, then you probably don’t think that this is such a common occurrence. But, according to Statista, even 69,57% of shoppers worldwide are making cart abandonment, so it becomes more clear why eCommerce businesses are taking it so seriously. Even though there will always be people who will abandon their shopping cart before making an order, there still is room for improvement in your eCommerce site in order to reduce this issue.

We are mentioning this as a first thing, and for a good reason. Many eCommerce sites think that their job is done by providing the wanted products/services for the customers. Actually, it is still far from it. Proceeding with the actual buy is as much important as all the other previous steps. So, if the transaction process is too long, or even worse, untrustworthy, you will most likely face the cart abandonment scenario. As we have already discussed in one of our previous blog posts, customers often show discomfort when it comes to revealing their personal information, especially ones regarding their financial identity. This is understandable, so why wouldn’t you turn this into your advantage by including, for example, recognizable trust logos such as Norton Secured (or some other) into your transaction forms? According to Shopify, 61% of customers had not purchased something online because trust logos were missing.

If in brick-and-mortar stores you have price tags displayed in front of the product so that customer knows what to expect when comes to the cash register, why wouldn’t you do the same thing online? No matter how much someone wants a product/service that you are offering, if they see that you tried to trick them by hiding some additional costs and fees, the will not proceed with the buying. This especially refers to shopping costs – it is completely necessary that you are upfront about this matter because these costs can often be very high, and make the purchase unfavorable. Also, customers want to know what to expect regarding delivery. No one likes to wait for anything, but if you above everything lie to the customer regarding the estimated delivery time, it only makes the chances for cart abandonment higher.

If you have already made your customer all the way through the end of the process, it would be such a waste of time and effort if he leaves because of the paying methods. Paying methods are a very common reason for cart abandonment if you are offering only one paying method. By offering more paying methods you are decreasing the number of reasons for cart abandonment, but, on the other hand, you are inevitable making yourself more work to do in terms of coordination with all payment providers. Besides paying by using a credit card, there are so many other ways as well, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet and it would be a good thing to provide your customers with a variety of choices.

You are probably familiar with the situation in a brick-and-mortar store where sellers are offering you coupons, catalogs, asking if you own a loyalty card, and if you don’t, ask you to make one and so on. You are most likely to say no to all of these questions, and not necessarily because you are not interested, but because you don’t have time and want to finish the buying the faster as possible. The same thing goes for buying online. All of these things take time and because of that, they represent an unnecessary waste of customer’s time. But, if you show the customers where they currently are in the checkout process, you are giving them an estimation of how much time do they need to make in order to fulfill the process. By doing so, you are actually making the process more clear and understandable, and the most important thing, you are assuring them that they are almost finished, so they can go back to the things that they were previously doing.

This point is also very important when it comes to cart abandonment. You are already familiar with the lack of patience that the new generation of customers has, so you need to make sure that your checkout page (and the whole website as well) work as smoothly as possible. Some things on your website are more easily optimized then the others, such as for example images, or tags and links for your social media, and it’s your responsibility to make them work. On the other hand, there are issues regarding payment that are out of your control. For example, you can’t affect how fast will the payment provider process the payment. However, the thing that you can do is to inform your customers about that, or maybe to show them a progress indicator. No one wants to be left with that unpleasant feeling of not knowing if their order was successfully placed or not, especially when it required leaving some financial information.

One of the biggest and most common mistakes that marketers can do is to make assumptions about their customer’s behavior. Something might seem very intuitive and logical, but the reality can be quite the opposite. Rather than guessing about what is right or wrong, use Google Analytics as an insight into the behavior of your customers. This will show you what are the pages where the traffic drops before making it to the cart section. Do the customers find some pages more intriguing than the others, are the content and site navigation too confusing are just some of the questions for which you can find an answer in Analytics. Analytics offers you so many possibilities – for example, you can track from where your customers are, which can be very useful in terms of already mentioned shipping costs. So, as you can see, cart abandonment is extremely connected with customer experience.

Last, but not the least – use cart abandonment emails. If a customer came to the shopping cart and then left, that means that, in the meantime, you probably had time to capture his email through the steps that he had to pass. You can always turn on the auto sender to notify them right away that they have left their purchase and that you are reminding them to proceed with it. You can determinate some time frame during which they’ll be getting these email’s and if after everything they don’t make the purchase, you might as well send an email offering some discounts for products that you know they’ve been looking for on your website. If nothing of this works, you can always save their email in your database and use it for some future remarketing campaigns.

In the end, whenever you are facing some problem, your first step should be trying to understand the reasons that lie behind. Therefore, dealing with cart abandonment issues requires no different approach. Maybe your eCommerce website is struggling with only something mentioned above, but never the less, some of the points made can make you think again about the strategy that you are using, and maybe give you some new ideas that you have not considered before.

Do you agree that these 7 improvements can help in defeating cart abandonment phenomena? If you have some others in mind, please share them with us!