How Do I Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment?

“69.23% - average documented shopping cart abandonment rate" - Baymard Institute

Abandoned carts have always been a problem for ecommerce sellers It is difficult to find out the exact reason why customers abandon their cart so recovering the sale can be a difficult task. Statista did a survey to find out the different reasons people abandoned their carts. Some of the reasons were;

• Presented with unexpected costs

When customers abandon their cart due to unexpected costs, they're usually referring to shipping costs or tax. Reducing these unexpected costs should help to reduce your abandoned cart rate. The first thing that you can do is to be more transparent with your pricing. You could have your prices listed as tax inclusive and some information on your product page notifying your customers that there could be shipping costs. 

Customers have been given the pleasure of free shipping from a lot of the bigger ecommerce companies and now, it's almost an expected service. Your best bet to compete is to try to offer free shipping. A study from Retention Science shows that free shipping is a 2x more effective incentive than percent-off offers.

When people abandon their carts, sending them an email with a discount code or an offer for free shipping will really help to reduce the total cart abandonment rate.

• I was just browsing

Some customers will use online shopping carts as wishlists. When someone visits your website for the first time, they're often just browsing your products. It can take multiple visits and some time before a customer decides to actually buy from you. "Only 0.25% of new visitors to your site will make a purchase. If you can get them to visit again, your chances of making a sale increase nine-fold." - SAP Hybrid

You could entice your new customers back with multiple techniques. You could use retargeting ads. If you base them on the product page that your customer spent the most time on so that when they leave your website, they will see your ad as they visit other websites and will likely come back to finish their purchase. IAdRol does a really good job of explaining how it works. You could also use limited time offers targeted at first-time customers on your website, you can offer a discount, free shipping or another offer to help them decide to make the purchase. 

• Found a better price elsewhere

People will very often comparison shop around many different ecommerce websites to try to find the best deals. Researching your competitors and matching their prices is a good place to start. One of the most successful techniques that you can use to secure a sale is a price guarantee. Asda is competing with other big supermarkets like Sainsburys and Tesco, they use a price guarantee to secure their customers.

Customers still shop with Asda's competitors. This is because they have good loyalty programs, like Tesco Clubcard, that gives the customer an incentive to buy from them. Introducing a loyalty program to your ecommerce website could be a good alternative to lowering your prices. 

• Website navigation too complicated

If your website navigation is too complicated for a customer to not be able to figure out how to buy from you, you're doing something wrong.

You need to have clear call-to-actions with appropriate text that stand out on the page. The text should show clearly what users of your website will expect to happen when they click. For example, An "Add to Basket" CTA that adds your product to the basket or a "Checkout now" CTA that brings the customer to the checkout.

Streamlining your checkout is another way to simplify your website. This is done by removing the website navigation in the checkout to make sure that your customers don't get lost as they go to purchase.

You could also think about adding a chat widget to your website so that if customers are confused or find your navigation to be too complicated, they will be able to contact you so that they can sort out the problem that they're having. 

How can we help?

iPages provide multiple options for how to address your cart abandonment and usually we'll start by looking at your webstats and deciding which approach is best for your customers. Cart Abandonment emails come as standard with iPages and, if you fancy further reading, here is an article on how cart abandonment emails boost sales. 

If you'd like further information about how iPages could help you reduce cart abandonment, do not hesitate to get in touch.