How to Benefit from Shopping Cart Abandonment

Why Abandoned Shopping Carts Can Be an Opportunity, Not a Problem

Reduce Future Abandoned Shopping Carts and Increase Sales

Shopping cart abandonment is a major problem in eCommerce, with companies missing out on billions of dollars in revenue annually. According to the Baymard Institute, 70.22% of online shopping carts are abandoned before or during the checkout process. Of course, not all abandoned shopping carts can be avoided – sometimes consumers want to save their carts for later, or they may need to run the costs by someone else before purchasing. While it is unrealistic to aim to eliminate shopping cart abandonment completely, there are ways to alleviate the problem and use shopping cart abandonment to your company’s advantage.

Preventing Shopping Cart Abandonment

Before you try chasing after shopping cart abandoners with email campaigns and retargeting, it is best to be proactive and try to reduce lost sales from abandoned carts in the first place. Evaluate your checkout process to ensure that it’s easy for consumers, allow consumers to checkout as a guest without registering, offer competitive pricing and/or free shipping, or allow consumers to save their cart for later. Another main reason consumers abandon their carts is because of hidden fees that crept up during checkout, so be sure your website is transparent regarding shipping costs, the return policy, or any additional fees before customers reach checkout, become frustrated, ditch your page, and increase your cart abandon rate.

Retarget Abandoners

Once you have evaluated your checkout process and made adjustments you can begin the process of retargeting the shopping cart abandoners. Use retargeted ads to follow your customers around the Internet and remind them about the products they viewed or placed in their online carts without buying. Since many abandoners don’t purchase because of a high product or shipping cost, retargeted ads work especially well when a discounted price or free shipping is offered. In 2014, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) conducted a poll and found that over 50% of online consumers would be likely to return to their carts if products were presented to them at a discounted rate, with that number rising to 72% for people aged 25-34.

Email Campaigns

In addition to retargeting, email campaigns should be utilized to drive abandoned consumers back to your site. While you can email consumers about discounts, sales, or free shipping, you should save those messages for retargeted ads if they’re in your budget. Instead, send emails to abandoners asking if they had any trouble with the checkout process, and provide help if needed. These emails should be from a live email account from a real person (rather than automated) to ensure consumers trust, as well as to ensure a timely response.

Be sure to document customer responses for any trends, because you may find the purchase intent was strong, but a bug prevented the checkout from completing, or maybe consumers didn’t know about a shipping cost until the checkout page and decided to leave. If you find consumers aren’t purchasing for the same reasons, it may be beneficial to fix glitches, update your web design, or even alter portions of your business model to prevent future cart abandonment.

Clarity Can Help

Having an intuitive checkout process saves time for your customers and decreases your shopping cart abandonment rate. Clarity has done numerous projects for our clients helping them improve their checkout processes and shopping carts. To find out more about how Clarity can help your eCommerce company reduce shopping cart abandonment and make your checkout process easier, call or click to contact us today!