You’ve created a perfect e-commerce store with some of the best products in the industry. You anticipate they should sell like hotcakes, but unfortunately, it doesn’t happen in reality. Your store fails to reach its targeted sales due to a high shopping cart abandonment rate.
Shopping cart abandonment not only reduces your sales significantly but also triggers frustration. Fortunately, there’re many effective methods to reduce it and increase online sales.
In this post, we’re going to discuss twenty actionable strategies to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate, along with a couple of important topics. Whether you’re a beginner or an e-commerce pro, these strategies will help you eliminate most of the issues that lead to cart abandonment.
For any e-commerce business, having a fast, completely safe, and secure checkout process is simply a must to reduce shopping cart abandonment. With Xpresslane’s fastest and safest checkout process, you can transform your users’ online shopping experience while giving a boost to your sales revenue.
Table of Contents
What Is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
So, what is cart abandonment exactly? Shopping cart abandonment happens when your consumers add products to their shopping cart but leave without completing the purchase. And you may not even realize how much revenue you’re losing due to this.
According to Baymard Institute, the average shopping cart abandonment rate stands at 69.82%. It means that around 70% of your e-commerce store visitors, who’ve even added your products to their carts, will actually never be your customers.
When it comes to the monetary impact, e-commerce businesses may lose up to a whopping $18 billion in yearly revenue, says Forrester research. Of course, brands can never recover all of those sales, but it’s surely possible to convert a good percent of them.
How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?
Now that you know what is cart abandonment let’s delve into twenty strategies on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment. The factors that increase cart abandonment rate vary according to industries, products, and the type of consumers. Therefore, some of these strategies may work better for you than others.
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Mention Additional Costs Clearly
Additional costs are one of the top reasons behind shopping cart abandonment. There’re some additional costs that you’ll never be able to eliminate, but you can always mention them clearly.
Image: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ecommerce-taxes-fees/
When you mention extra costs like applicable taxes, shipping charges, and any other applicable fees on the order preview page, you should be able to reduce cart abandonment rate because customers won’t have to see any unexpected price increase when making the payment.
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Allow Guest Checkout
Nobody likes to be forced to fill up a mandatory form before completing the checkout process. It not only reduces the speed of the process but also irritates the user. Allowing guest checkout is an effective idea to lower shopping cart abandonment.
Image: https://growrevenue.io/guest-checkout-ecommerce/
If you want to collect user data, you can always give the shoppers an option to register after completing the purchase. If they’re satisfied with the experience, they’ll most likely fill up the form.
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Use Clear Calls to Action in the Cart
Most likely, you’re already aware of the power of prominent CTAs in improving conversion rates but are you utilizing them in the shopping cart? If not, you should start doing it immediately. By providing them, you’ll guide the users on what to do next.
For instance, you can inform the shoppers that the item that they’ve chosen is added to the cart, and hence, they can continue shopping, edit the cart, or check out.
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Include an Option to Buy Later
Many shoppers use shopping carts as a place to save items they want to purchase later or as a wishlist. Rather than funneling them into the shopping cart, you can include a “save for later” button to make the process easy for them.
Image: https://www.storeapps.org/docs/sfl-how-it-works/
For you, it’ll lead to lowered shopping cart abandonment rates, and for your customers, it’ll help them complete the purchase easily from their wishlist later on. They’ll only need to complete the checkout process to buy the products.
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Add a Progress Indicator
It’s a simple tweak but can be a game-changer in reducing your cart abandonment rate. A progress indicator displays how many steps the shoppers still need to complete to make the purchase.
Image: https://www.commaconsulting.com.au/articles/best-practice-checkout-progress-bar
It eliminates the worry of having to complete a lengthy checkout process. Shoppers will also have a feeling of forwarding momentum as they continue to achieve the goal of buying a product. And when shoppers clearly see that they only need to complete only a couple of steps to make the purchase, most of them will likely complete the process right away.
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Show Security Badges
Many shoppers leave the shopping cart at the final stage due to concerns related to making online transactions. Displaying security badges is an effective approach to help eliminate their fear and build trust. This will give them peace of mind to purchase from your site.
Image: https://raycorcoran.com.au/social-proof-website-trust-indicators/security-seal-website-social-proof/
Some of the popular security badges used by e-commerce sites include McAfee, VeriSign, etc. Just be sure to make them clearly visible and recognizable on the checkout page.
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Utilize Exit-Intent Popups
The use of exit-intent popups is one of the highly effective strategies to lower cart abandonment rate. They help to convert prospects into customers by displaying a compelling message. Right when the shoppers want to leave, you can display attractive offers and deals to retain them.
Image: https://popupsmart.com/blog/exit-intent-popup-examples
Install exit-intent popups on your shopping cart and checkout pages, and they’ll automatically send a popup message by detecting the user’s intention to leave the page.
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Display the Remaining Quantity of Products
You can influence the shoppers by showing the remaining quantity of the products they’ve chosen. The number of products left in stock tells them that the items might not be available later.
It essentially generates a sense of urgency and motivates shoppers to finalize their buying decisions instantly. They’ll automatically act fast and end up buying the products. You can also offer a particular deal for certain hours, which also helps to lower shopping cart abandonment.
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Add User-Generated Content
Adding user-generated content is another highly effective strategy to reduce cart abandonment rate. A huge number of e-commerce brands are using this and experiencing the advantage.
Image: https://wwd.com/business-news/technology/smart-filters-increase-conversion-1202920439/
It’s a kind of marketing opportunity to help shoppers understand the unique aspects of your products and make them relate to the items a little bit more. Shoppers also tend to base their buying decision heavily on the feedback of the customers who’re already using the product.
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Let Shoppers Review and Edit Their Shopping Cart
Some checkout systems are developed in such a manner that they make it very difficult for shoppers to go back and review if they’ve added the right item(s). Sometimes, as they click on the “back” button, the cart simply gets emptied out.
And in today’s busy world, there’re very few shoppers who’ll be willing to add products to the cart again from scratch. Therefore, implement a checkout process that lets the shoppers to go back conveniently and do modifications to their shopping cart.
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Offer Low-Cost or Free Shipping Options
Low-cost or free shipping entices any shopper, and hence, it’s an effective strategy to lower cart abandonment rates. Usually, online shoppers don’t want to go for the option where they’ll need to pay a hefty shipping charge.
Offering free or low-cost shipping may feel like an additional financial burden to your business, but there’re methods to cover that cost. For instance, you can utilize e-commerce shipping software that automatically finds affordable shipping rates and streamlines the process. By using the software, you can reduce shipping costs and minimize manpower while making the process efficient and faster.
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Offer Several Payment Options
Offering a minimum number of payment options often leads to increased shopping cart abandonment, especially when there’re many different types of payment options available. Different shoppers prefer to make payments using different methods, meaning they may leave the cart if they don’t find their preferred modes.
Image: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/for-2020-multiple-payment-options-are-essential
You don’t need to add a dozen of payment methods, but you should have the popular methods such as PayPal, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, etc., in addition to debit cards, credit cards, and internet banking. The more options you present to the shoppers, the more opportunity you receive to lower cart abandonment rate.
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Let Shoppers Choose Delivery Option
Make it clear to the shoppers when they’ll receive their products before they buy those. As you can see in the below image, Amazon lets the shoppers choose their preferred delivery option depending on their requirements, which encourages them to complete the checkout process.
Image: https://lifeunlearned.com/clever-amazon-prime-money-saving-tips/
If you cannot add the option like the above one, you should display an estimated delivery time before shoppers add items to their cart. It’ll help them clearly understand if they should buy the product now or later.
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Lower the Number of Steps in the Checkout Process
Your checkout process needs to be short and sweet, or else you may risk losing a significant percentage of potential customers. Simply put, the more complex and lengthy your checkout process, the more likely shoppers are to abandon the shopping cart.
Ideally, the checkout process should comprise three to five steps, and if you can make it shorter, even better. It’s also crucial to ensure that a single step doesn’t need too many fields to be filled up by the shoppers.
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Avoid Upselling in the Shopping Cart
Placing links in the shopping cart to upsell with related products is a common mistake done by many e-commerce businesses. The shoppers may leave the cart on their own, but placing additional links to other products creates distraction and makes it easier for them.
When you place links to other related products and shoppers click on them, they may never return to purchase the products that they’ve already added to the shopping cart.
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Add One-Click Shopping
Did you know that Amazon has perhaps made billions by introducing its one-click shopping button? Shoppers only need to click the button to buy the products instantly.
You can take the concept from Amazon and create your personal easy-to-buy button. It won’t be useful for unregistered shoppers, but members will surely get the benefit as they won’t have to complete the checkout process each time they buy something from you.
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Offer Intent-Based Incentives
Sometimes, people just browse an e-commerce store and add products to the shopping cart without any intention to complete the purchase. And if there’s no intent behind a visitor’s action of adding items to the shopping cart, there won’t be any conversion.
Using intent-based incentives lets you entice those users to complete a purchase immediately. For example, you can offer personalized promotions depending on their real-time behaviours to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
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Offer Interest-Free Payment Plans
Of course, a high cart value is very important to any e-commerce business owner, but if it ultimately leads to an increased cart abandonment rate, you need to consider other options. Offering interest-free payment plans is an effective way to eliminate this issue.
This helps to keep the visitors from abandoning the shopping cart when the price becomes too high for them. The ability to pay using interest-free installments makes it much easier for customers to purchase a large number of products at once.
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Establish Effortless Navigation between Store and Cart
Consumers want to add items to the shopping cart quickly and go back to the store to browse their inventory as smoothly as possible. The more work they need to do, the more likely they’re to abandon the shopping cart.
Therefore, you need to make it simple for the customers to add items to the cart and return to the store quickly. If you wish to make it even simpler, you may allow the buyers to checkout straight from the product page, minimizing the number of page views and clicks to complete a transaction.
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Stay Away From Giving Surprises
Bad surprises are among the common reasons behind shopping cart abandonment. For some shoppers, online shopping can be a complex process, and when you add surprises to it, they may never come back even after adding items to the cart.
So, it’s vital to carefully revisit your checkout process, identify and eliminate any surprises. Just make it simple, clear, free of unexpected messages, unnecessary popups, and other factors that can interrupt the process.
What Is Shopping Cart Recovery?
It’s common for e-commerce businesses to experience high cart abandonment rates even after implementing the above-mentioned strategies on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment. And that’s exactly where the importance of abandoned cart recovery strategies comes into the picture.
Abandoned cart recovery refers to the process of motivating your prospects to complete the purchase after they’ve left the shopping cart.
Here, we’ve handpicked four strategies that will help you accomplish this goal.
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Use Abandoned Cart Emails
The ability to efficiently handle shopping cart abandonment isn’t only limited to optimizing and improving your site’s shopping cart experience. Despite implementing the above strategies, you’ll still have some shoppers who abandon the cart.
Sending abandoned cart emails provides you an opportunity to capture the shoppers after they’ve abandoned the cart. Including an offer like a coupon or discount code is a useful way to entice them to come back and complete the purchase.
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Use Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns are effective because they take advantage of recency. When e-commerce shoppers abandon the cart, businesses have a couple of hours to regain them. If those shoppers are reminded of the purchase within a few hours, they may reconsider.
You’ll need to invest money to set up a retargeting campaign, but they’re highly effective in handling abandoned cart recovery efficiently.
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Send Push Notifications
We all regularly receive several social media notifications whenever someone in our circle starts an activity or posts something. The process of recovering abandoned shopping carts using push notifications follows the same thing.
By incorporating abandoned cart notifications, you can get better responses from the shoppers, which means some of them may come back and complete the purchase.
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Use an Abandoned Cart Recovery Solution
If you’ve tried all the above-mentioned strategies but haven’t seen any notable results, you may want to adopt an abandoned cart recovery solution. Generally, these solutions analyze the data in your conversion funnel to target shoppers who’ve abandoned the cart with reminders.
The objective is to entice the customers to revisit the store to complete the purchase. Just remember that different solutions offer different features that are compatible with different e-commerce platforms, and hence, choose one carefully.
Performance Testing For E-Commerce Website
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping has emerged as the first preference for shoppers. As a result, the e-commerce landscape has become more competitive than ever. It means if your e-commerce site fails to deliver its best performance, it’ll be impossible to outshine your competitors.
In this scenario, performance testing of your e-commerce site helps you prevent any unwanted failures when there’s a massive flow of online traffic. It also helps you uncover issues that may lead to shopping cart abandonment, and in turn, lost revenue.
Here’re the key factors you need to consider during performance testing of your site.
Website Load Time Testing
Website load time refers to the time your site takes to fully load on screen with all types of content on the page. And e-commerce sites have to load as quickly as possible, otherwise, they may run the risk of losing a significant volume of sales.
If you haven’t already optimized your site’s load time, you must do it immediately, especially when we consider the fact that page speed impacts nearly 70% of customers’ willingness to purchase from an e-commerce store.
You can utilize a free tool like PageSpeed Insights from Google to check the current load time of your site. If you observe that it takes more than two seconds to load (two seconds is the Google recommended threshold for e-commerce sites), you must focus on improving the speed.
Mobile Compatibility Testing
With 53.98% of all Internet traffic emerging from mobile devices, it has become simply a must for e-commerce business owners to make their sites mobile-friendly. The biggest concern in mobile compatibility testing is the presence of many different devices, platforms, and networks. The testing process should address performance issues generated as a result of those variations.
Generally, web developers implement responsive design and check its efficiency on different real devices. Responsive design allows your e-commerce site to adapt to varying screen sizes without compromising user experience and usability.
Load Testing
The objective of load testing is to evaluate how many visitors can simultaneously work on your e-commerce site. It also allows you to check whether your site delivers expected performance under both normal and expected peak load conditions. You can easily identify page load issues and system lags in the testing environment.
Scalability Testing
Scalability testing is performed to check how efficiently your site deals with the increasing volume of user load. Scalability plays a major role in the performance of your e-commerce website. This is because the expansion of your product range or the increase in the number of users can adversely impact your site’s performance.
While conducting performance testing for eCommerce websites requires investment, you must consider it. By identifying the issues and fixing them, you’ll be able to offer a seamless user experience to your visitors, convert them into customers, and reduce the cart abandonment rate.
Wrapping Up
For any e-commerce business, the process of dealing with shopping cart abandonment never ends. You must test and experiment with different strategies continuously to reduce it as much as possible and get the most effective results. All the strategies mentioned above are highly effective and proven. While you may never get rid of shopping cart abandonment completely, they’ll surely help you reduce the cart abandonment rate significantly.
FAQs:
Is shopping cart abandonment bad?
Yes, shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems for online retailers. Around the world, it costs retailers billions per year. Recouping even a small percentage of these transactions can give a significant boost to your sales revenue.
Can I take an abandoned shopping cart?
Regardless of the industry, quality of the products, and size of business, shopping cart abandonment happens to every online retailer. But you can use the strategies we discussed above to reduce your cart abandonment rate significantly.
What is abandoned cart recovery?
Abandoned cart recovery stands for the processes or actions that you take to entice shoppers who’ve already abandoned the cart to come back and complete the purchase.
Does Shopify have an abandoned cart?
Yes. When shoppers visit a Shopify store, add items to their carts but ultimately leave without completing the purchase, the cart is known as a Shopify abandoned cart.
How do I email an abandoned cart?
With the help of marketing automation or an email marketing service provider, you can set up a number of abandoned cart emails that automatically go out to shoppers who’ve abandoned their shopping carts. The emails need to have attractive subject lines, clear CTAs, catchy graphics, and clear copies.
Reduce shopping cart abandonment for your business using xpresslane.