7 Ways to Reduce Abandoned Carts and Earn More Customers

Based off average industry trends, it’s highly likely that your eCommerce store is only generating 1/3rd of the sales revenue it’s capable of. According to Shopify, 67.45% of all carts are abandoned before a customer finishes the sales process at your online store. That means 67 out of every 100 people who put items in a cart on your site never check out. In other words just 33% of your potential customers are actually making a purchase. Let’s assume your store makes $20,000 a month. If you initiated an abandoned cart reclamation process that brought back 20% of lost business, that’s an extra $4,000 of revenue per month. Over the course of an entire year, you’d add nearly $50,000 to your bottom line. The frustrating thing is that this money is there – items are in carts but people just aren’t buying. BigCommerce reported that 58.6% of people abandon their carts because they were just browsing. Luckily, there are multiple things to look at to improve abandoned cart rates on your site. Let’s take a look at some cart abandonment solutions you can start using today to earn more customers.

Use Cart Recovery Software

One of the most popular ways to reduce abandoned carts is through the use of cart recovery software. Options like Carts Guru lead the pack with the breadth of solutions they offer. Email retargeting, SMS retargeting, and social media retargeting are all included in more robust software tools. Software is a great way to go if you’re dealing with a high sales volume and want a catch-all solution for cart abandonment. You can completely automate your cart recovery system and watch the results come back in the form of more sales. Most major shopping cart platforms – including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento – offer some sort of built-in cart recovery services, though you may find a secondary software program better suits your store’s needs.

Limit Surprises

If you save surprise costs – like service fees, shipping, or even waiting to add up sales tax until the last possible moment – you’re practically pushing customers away. According to Statista, the most-cited reason for abandoning a cart is when a customer is presented with unexpected costs at checkout. Be upfront and transparent about any fees – especially shipping – before the customer reaches the final checkout stage, and you could see a drop in your cart abandonment rate.

Easy Checkout

According to a survey conducted by the Baymard Institute, the third most-common reason for cart abandonment is a checkout process that’s too long or too complicated. If at all possible, condense your checkout process to just a single page. This reduces the amount of opportunities for customers to leave their cart and never return. If you do go single-page checkout, though, you’ll want to provide some supplemental information on that page. Search Engine Land suggests that you: Provide quick-answers for shipping questions upfront. Clearly show their current shipping price, and perhaps a rate table of how it’ll change based on order size.

• Offer an easy way to update their cart.

These are fairly basic implementations, but they just work. Statista also cited that 13% of shoppers will leave their carts if they don’t feel the checkout process is secure. Adding security badges is simple – and can help regain up to 13% of lost revenue.

• Prominently display security badges to remind customers that your site is secure.

Get Rid of Accounts

In the past, we’ve used the “gateway” of forcing customers to create accounts on our sites in order to add to our email marketing lists. In fact, forcing an account creation event during checkout causes 23% of shoppers to abandon their carts, according to a study by Visual Website Optimizer. Simply ask for a customer’s email address – so you can send them updates on their order – and nothing more during the checkout process.

Save the Cart

Research from eMarketer tells us that 56% of shoppers use their cart to save items for purchase at a later date. Adding the option for shoppers to save their cart shouldn’t even be a question in light of that data. But you can go one step further than allowing them to save their cart – you can use a persistent shopping cart. A persistent cart is better than a “Save Cart” option for two major reasons: a persistent cart doesn’t require the shopper to create an account to save their cart, and it provides a seamless pick up from where they left off. This works through the use of long-term cookies and lets customers research different prices or shipping option before picking up their cart at your store.

Variable Payment

Customers want as many payment options as possible. As noted by Conversion XL, 50% of British adults who shop online will abandon their cart if they can’t pay with their preferred method. Adding as many payment options as you can feasibly support is the best option here. Shopify allows you to support virtually any payment option, thanks to their wide-ranging third-party payment processing support. BigCommerce offers similar solutions as well.

Optimize Page Design

22% of shoppers abandon carts because the site was too slow, had errors, or simply crashed. Here’s the real kicker, though: according to the Baymard Institute, if merchants were to focus only on fixing checkout usability issues (documented to be solvable), they could see a 35.26% conversion rate increase. Looking at the combined eCommerce sales between the US and EU – $738 billion, according to a 2015 eMarketer report –  that means merchants could take their share of the $260 billion that’s lost to poor checkout page design. To quote Baymard directly, that’s, “$260 billion worth of lost orders which are recoverable solely through a better checkout flow and design.” Checkout page optimization is a topic entirely to itself, but this piece from BigCommerce is a great place to start. Reducing shopping cart abandonment and regaining that lost revenue is entirely possible. It’s an activity you need to actively engage your store’s resources in, because the return on this particular investment is very, very high.]]>