Shopping cart task
What is shopping cart abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts a check-out process for an online order, but drops out of the process before completing the purchase. Any item that enters the shopping cart but never goes through the transaction is considered “abandoned” by the buyer. Shopping cart abandonment is an important aspect of the online shopping process that retailers pay careful attention to.
The shopping cart abandonment rate is calculated by dividing the total number of completed transactions by the total number of initiated transactions. This rate indicates the percentage of a website’s users who signal their intent to purchase by adding an item to their cart but do not complete the purchase.
The shopping cart abandonment rate is an important metric for e-commerce websites to track because a high abandonment rate could signal a poor user experience or broken sales funnel. Reducing shopping cart abandonment leads directly to more sales and revenue, so optimizing checkout flow is a core focus for many online retailers.
How can you reduce shopping cart abandonment?
There are many possible causes of shopping cart abandonment, making it a complex problem. The first step to solving the problem is to hypothesize why visitors abandon their carts. This can be done by looking at analytics data and identifying drop-off points, conducting user research and surveys, or comparing your checkout flow to competing sites.
Once a hypothesis is created, different solutions can be tested on the site through A/B testing to determine if a proposed solution helps improve cart abandonment rates.
For example, a common problem faced by many online stores is the trust issue. Although Web users have become more comfortable providing their credit cards over the Internet, many users may still be hesitant to provide their financial information to unfamiliar sites.
If the theory is that lack of trust leads to abandoned carts, various solutions can be implemented to increase trust, such as reviews and testimonials, trust seals, prominent pictures of real people, and money-back guarantees. Each of these can be tested on the website to determine if they have a statistically significant impact on abandonment rates.
In another example, a company may find that 25% of their shoppers abandon on the second page of their online shopping cart. Once they identify the problem area, they can implement various features to encourage users to complete the purchase.
For example, they could test adding a progress bar to give shoppers a visual indicator of where they are in the checkout process. Or they could offer shoppers a limited-time offer to complete the transaction immediately. They could even eliminate the second page of their checkout flow entirely through a redesign to speed up the checkout process.
By hypothesizing why shoppers abandon a cart they’ve already added products to and testing new ideas to improve the sales funnel, e-commerce sites can continually improve their site’s conversion rate and increase sales without having to spend more to drive traffic.
Shopping cart recovery
In addition to improving and optimizing the shopping cart experience, shopping cart recovery is another key strategy for dealing with shopping cart abandonment.
Despite your efforts to reduce cart abandonment, some percent of customers always abandon your site while checking out before making a purchase. This is where Cart Recovery comes in to try and capture the customer after they have already left your e-commerce site.
There are two main methods of data recovery:
Abandoned Cart Emails-If the user entered their email address during the checkout process before leaving your site, there is an opportunity to send them an abandonment email. This is usually some form of offer or coupon code to entice the user to return to your site and complete the purchase.
Abandoned cart retargeting – Ad retargeting is another powerful tactic in cart recovery. With retargeting, you place an ad pixel on your checkout page and can then remarket to those users on ad platforms like Facebook and Google. The advantage of retargeting is that it works even if the user hasn’t entered their email address, and you can stay top of mind for the customer as they browse the web.
Common reasons for shopping cart abandonment
Every e-commerce store is different, but the following are some common issues that many websites face that lead to shopping cart abandonment:
Lack of trust-Web users are not always comfortable providing credit card information online. Improve conversions by building more trust on the checkout page and throughout the site through social proof and building a strong brand. A generous return policy can also help diffuse customer concerns.
High shipping customers often abandon shopping carts when they get a shock after seeing how much their order costs with shipping. Avoid this by offering free shipping promos.
Complexity-Online shoppers have a short attention span and abandon the checkout flow if it’s too complex or time-consuming. Avoid this by making the checkout process as simple and painless as possible. This can include
Browsing-Many users who add items to the cart but don’t complete are browsing with little intent to buy. Incentivize these users to buy immediately by offering limited-time promos and creating a sense of urgency.
Missing payment options Customers often have strong preferences on how they want to pay, and only complete a purchase when their preferred method is presented. Reduce this problem by offering the most popular payment methods for your target audience, such as Amex and PayPal.
Price too high – users on the web often, comparison store to find the best deals. You can prevent customers from jumping ship by offering special discounts and coupon codes to prevent them from being scared by high prices and looking elsewhere for better deals.
Technical issues – All technology is prone to technical issues and glitches. Be sure to monitor your analytics and perform regular checks of the checkout process to ensure there are no show-stopping errors. Also, make sure the code on your checkout page is optimized to avoid long load times.
Why A / B testing is key to reducing shopping cart abandonment.
There are many different reasons why customers abandon shopping carts and many possible ways to resolve them, which is why A / B testing is an important part of reducing shopping cart abandonment.