Shopping Cart Abandonment is the number one problem cited by 72% of ecommerce store owners. In March 2022, Multi Brand Retail per Dynamic Yield had seen the highest shopping cart abandonment rates ever at 76.43%. America has witnessed the most abandoned carts overall (73.72%), followed by APAC (73.2%), and then EMEA (67.98%).
How to calculate shopping cart abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment rates can be calculated by beginning to identify the total number of purchases that have occurred over a fixed period (i.e. one month) and divide it by the shopping carts created within the same period.
If 250 people, completed purchases this week and 850 carts were created, the shopping cart abandonment rate would be 70.6%.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate = [1 – Purchases / Carts Created] X 100
According to an emarketer-paysafe 2021 report, there are a number of reasons why shoppers abandon carts. While 35% of visitors are cited as only browsing, 24% of shoppers abandon carts as their cards declined, 18% abandon carts due to shipping timelines and another 16% state the mandatory nature of creating customer accounts for making purchases is the reason for shopping cart abandonment.
The other reasons cited were complexity of payment steps prior to checkout, too much information to enter at checkout and payment security concerns during checkout.
15 Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment & Boost Conversions
1. Build an Irresistible Bond With Customers to reduce cart abandonment
Leveraging deep content which helps elevate brand trust and moves customers seamlessly through the customer decision journey.
Focus on producing top notch content on your website to cater to entertaining, educating, informing and convincing prospects and returning customers about the brand’s purpose and mission besides product features and benefits.
This helps build familiarity and trust with the brand and helps customers identify with the problem or need the brand could solve for. Without deep content, customers are not “warmed” up enough or even convinced and can quickly churn or abandon carts depending on competitive offers and brand strength.
Focusing on having rich homepages, category and collection pages and product detail pages help keep the customer focused and ensure a common “scent trail”. This reduced dissonance helps move customers faster down the funnel as well increases both add to cart rates and conversion rates.
2. Highlight Shipping Terms To Build Trust And Remove Doubt
“Expensive Shipping Costs” or “unclear shipping costs” is the number one reason digital shoppers give for abandoning a cart. So what can ecommerce entrepreneurs focus on?
a. State clear shipping costs
On the first page of your cart. Hiding shipping costs until the last checkout step causes frustrated buyers who eventually abandon carts
b. Offer free shipping when orders reach a threshold
c. Consider offering a flat shipping rate to the customer
Give them a reason to buy and for your store to increase AOV and cashflow
d. Offer tiered shipping for different shipping weightages
3. Ensure page load speeds are lightning fast to reduce bounce rates, increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment
Site speed both on desktop and mobile or tablet is a topic that often gets neglected. However, not addressing this issue can cause a serious blow to your conversion rates. Any page that takes more than 3 seconds to load will prompt a user to look elsewhere. At four seconds, one tends to lose a quarter of visitors that arrive on your website.
a. Align design, copy and UX team work
To drive sales as a singular goal. Being aware that sales trumps aesthetics and image design is key.
b. Setup an ongoing process to test load times
c. Optimize pages loading slower than 3 seconds
d. Get visitors to your content quickly
4. Make your delivery and shipping policy clear, transparent and seamless to reduce friction and reduce cart abandonment
Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s COO said that “Your return policy is as important as the price of your product”. When it comes to delivery time expectations, per the UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper Report 2018, consumers in Asia, Mexico and Brazil expect to be able to place orders later in the day and still be eligible for next day delivery.
44% of online shoppers in the US are more likely to have returned an online purchase. When both return options are available, returns online and to physical stores. Consumers in Asia and Europe prefer to ship online purchases back to retailers. While those in US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil prefer to ship returns to a physical store. Below are areas your shoppers want you to pay attention to:
a. Shoppers expect free shipping on returns
Amazon has raised the bar for service delivery and returns. Globally most customers expect free shipping. Hence, it is imperative to reduce return rates to prevent margin erosion. However, it is also imperative that shoppers are provided with free shipping on returns as the likelihood of a customer repeat purchasing at your store is 90% if you delivered to your promise and communicated both your return and shipping policy clearly.
b. Launch a hassle free returns policy
Customers want a frictionless returns experience and would like to avoid endless hoops to connect to initiate a return.
c. Allow customers to print labels easily
Ensure the returns policy process and label creation process is simple and convenient
d. Communicate refund processing timelines
While credit card processing times are not in any organizations control. An ecommerce D2C brand can expedite the refund processing faster at their end and clearly communicate the typical refund timelines upfront.
5. Add social proof with UGC to provide a rich perspective and increase brand consideration, reliability and grow CX
Social proof is key to driving conversions and building trust with your brand. Adding social proof can drive up conversions by 15%. Social Proof has helped build customer trust, validate a buyer decision, improve brand presence and business credibility.
Learn how to build social proof and acquire qualified shoppers to help retention.
It also helps build shopper excitement, showcases the product in action, enhances customer experiences and compels buying action.
92% of customers are more likely to trust non-paid recommendations than any other form of advertising. Shoppers 18-24 years old expect an average of 203 reviews per product page.
According to OptinMonster, testimonials can increase conversions on the sales page by 34%. Even better would be leveraging content from user generated content or influencers. 40% of people say they’ve purchased a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on social media.
Leveraging tools like Okendo or Yotpo, a Shopify ecommerce store can incentivize and reward customers with loyalty points, route negative comments to Gorgias or customer support helpdesk, push reviews to Google and create re-targeting ads as well as cross-pollinate UGC across ads, blogs, landing pages and email campaigns.
6. Provide chat or phone help 24X7 to answer all customer queries with the goal to place orders that minimize returns
There maybe a single doubt in a customers mind that is left unanswered, either on the product detail page, home page or the shopping cart page. As an ecommerce store owner, it your responsibility to deeply understand what the customer is looking for. Hence, gaining insights into areas which cause friction in the buyer journey is key. This can be achieved in the following way:
a. Launch Surveys
To understand what customers are unhappy about and what information is difficult to get. Once collated, plan to execute and plug those gaps.
b. Provide a Chatbot
Chatbots help ecommerce stores close the gap and provide instant answers to customers in real time. Chatbots help generate a potential lead instantly, by reducing time to first response, ecommerce stores can accelerate time to first purchase and boost repeat purchase rates considerably also resulting in reducing cart abandonment.
c. Turn your customer support team into a profit center with Gorgias
Turn your customer support team into a profit center. Leverage live chat to cut down phone calls and old fashioned contact forms. Track inquiries via macros to chat and phone support leveraging Gorgias. There are many benefits to leveraging live chat via Gorgias, learn these benefits and best practices here.
Learn more about how to create an incredible customer experience for your DTC store here.
d. Integrate FAQs on Product Pages
In order to cut down the amount of live support needed.
7. Leverage one click upsells and one click shopping experiences for customers buying from your store to drive up AOV and sales
With specific Shopify apps, such as ReBuy one can maximize AOV by launching upsell and cross-sell opportunities easily customize and optimize your shopping cart and launch post-purchase offers when purchase intent is the highest.
Multiproduct cross-sells allow ecommerce stores to boost AOV by adding an additional three offers to the product page buy box. This is especially important as more than 50% of product page viewers don’t scroll beyond the buy box.
With one click upsells both in the form of pre-order and post-order bumps one can get more products in front of customers, make purchasing and discovering these products more convenient and also increase AOV without additional marketing costs.
Learn 15 powerful ways to optimize AOV increase for your store here.
With your coordinated efforts around investing in product detail pages, paid ads, blogs, email marketing and offer led landing pages – one could maximize this investment by adding cross-sells leveraging existing organic and paid traffic that hits your ecommerce store.
One click upsells can be made successful by providing a red carpet welcome to your customers. Think of ways you could enrich the purchase experience and make your customers feel more valued.
8. Make navigation directions and CTA clear, frictionless and seamless to avoid prospective buyers
By ensuring the path to purchase is clear and simple, the customer journey and experience gets seamless leading to less friction, more trust and hence more conversions and sales for your ecommerce store! This reduces cart abandonment rates and improves conversion rates
Below are three ways in which one can make UX simple and coherent for your store
a. Perform a Site Audit
To find specific points that are roadblocks to the customers journey. Audit your marketing funnels
b. Conduct Heatmap Analysis
Launch surveys to discover specific elements that cause irritability and frustration to your site visitors
c. Test your CTAs
To make sure they are effective, lucid and elicit desired action or shopper behavior
9. Audit Full Funnels to Maximize Conversions
Regular full funnel audits expose those choke points along the path to purchase that are causing the leaky bucket and draining revenue for your ecommerce store.
a. Educate visitors on the checkout process
b. Offer a guest checkout – mandated registrations cause friction
c. Keep back buttons functional so visitors can go back and forth
d. Display trust signals throughout the website and checkout process
e. Reduce alternative navigational options at checkout
f. Provide real time chat support
g. Prevent shipping cost surprises
10. Create an Abandoned Checkout Email With Email Reminders
The purpose of an abandoned checkout email is to remind the customer of the item(s) left behind. Its purpose can further be strengthened to showcase trust and credibility. One can encourage prospects to complete the order and remind them of orders left behind. Learn how to use shopping cart abandonment to drive sales, strategies and examples here.
Gain more insights on powerful email personalization strategies to build a profitable store here.
One can add cross-sell or complimentary offers and further build trust, educate customers about the legacy of your brand, share brand stories and social proof or even make an offer to join a loyalty benefit program after making a purchase.
The cart saver pop up is an effective strategy to reduce abandoned carts because it allows one to rescue the cart before shoppers actually abandon carts. These get launched on the website when the shopper demonstrates intent to exit the site.
Advanced Cart Abandonment Email Campaigns follow an exit intent pop-up strategy with tiered offers depending upon the AOV of the product or bundled offer. For example with low AOV products the offer could include only free shipping.
However, for $150-$500 USD products one could offer $20 plus free shipping off and those products with AOV between 500-1000 USD could be offered $50-99 USD off along with free shipping.
11. Offer customers exciting deals, strong offers, complimentary deals and attractive coupons through cross-sells and upsells
The cart review page could have exciting deals about complimentary products showcased, other standalone products that have been purchased earlier or bundled offers can be leveraged.
Brands such as Pura Vida leverage Nosto for personalization, Klaviyo for email marketing and segmentation, Yotpo and Okendo to generate social proof and UGC besides amplify these reviews across Google Ads and Google Shopping search results.
This further strengthens brand trust and provides a strong purpose to the customer to fulfil the final action i.e. hit the purchase button and make a purchase.
12. Showcase contact information on every page to build trust and communicate the 24/7 availability of your customer service team
When contact information is showcased it instills trust and removes fear. Ways to take action today:
a. Give visitors plenty of options to contact you
b. Make sure every customer contact point is well monitored
c. Make contact information available on each product page
13. Ensure the right martech stack to reduce cart abandonment rate and optimize for conversions
Ecommerce stores could leverage tools such as Klaviyo, Privy, PostScript or Just Uno to reduce cart abandonment and optimize for conversions
With the right martech stack not only can one reduce the path to purchase, one can even build a loyal, engaged audience and raving fans that accelerate repeat purchase rates, drive up AOV and increase customer lifetime value. Leverage the martech stack recommended by top DTC entrepreneurs here.
In addition, focus on conversion rate optimisation and constantly improve customer experience at every stage of the purchase cycle would improve brand experience, brand trust and accelerate brand loyalty.
Building customized landing pages leveraging UnBounce, OptinMonster or GemPages will help build trust, accelerate engagement and conversions.
14. Ensure all payment options are available to meet varied customer payment preferences
Different customers have different preferences when specific payment options are not available to customers based on their payment preferences, then this can cause much frustration and lead to high cart abandonment. DTC entrepreneurs can prevent cart abandonment by following the below steps:
a. Conduct a Survey to identify payment options
b. Audit payment process to check the efficiency and accuracy of transaction post the CTA click
c. Consider the addition of coupons and discount codes by default to avoid friction in the purchase process
15. Build conversion optimized product pages with stacked conversion assets to reduce cart abandonment
Conversion assets are a piece of media ( image, text, video etc.) that support a prospect in making a buying decision. Simply put your product page is an conglomeration of conversion assets working in synchrony with each other, all with a single goal achieving a conversion and the solution to the problem.
Ways to Optimize Product Pages
a. Build resonance across product pages
Ensure Header, Carousel and Buy Box reaffirm brand identity while the header must provide access to non-product content that is necessary, focus on ensuring the carousel demonstrates product benefit, use cases and has images that load fast. The buy box must overcome any sales objections and assist in cross-sell and upsell
b. Focus on product navigation links
Think of your product navigation as your “table of contents” for your product . Some of the potential links could be continue shopping, Buy Now, Reviews, Story, Contact Us, FAQ
c. Add Testimonials
Add short testimonials that enthusiastically endorses the product
d. Add Product Carousels
Add in context product photographs that show your product being used in its intended environment
e. Add appropriate CTA text
Add appropriate CTA text, “Buy Now”, “ Add To Cart” or “Add To Bag”
f. Add Order Bumps as necessary
Pre or Post Purchase Bumps can be used to maximize AOV
g. Focus on Mini-Stories
Help customers understand who made the product? What inspired the creation of the product? How was the product tested? What obstacles did you overcome to develop the product?
h. Add Guarantees
Common guarantees include money back, lifetime warranty, Happiness Guarantee, Buy Back, lowest price
i. Implement a Reviews Widget
Adding reviews plugin like YotPo or Okendo would help bring user generated content and social proof to your product detail page. Decrease cart abandonment by showing your best reviews and highly-rated products at checkout. Online conversions increase by 133% when mobile shoppers see positive reviews before buying
j. Write Product FAQs
focus on writing your product FAQs with the goal to reduce any doubts in the buyers mind that can cause potential friction with the ultimate action -making a purchase
Concluding Thoughts:
Shopping Cart Abandonment is the most common issue plaguing DTC stores. Its safe to say that the shopping cart optimization process is not complicated if all actions are followed step by step with each step being A/B tested for better results. The easier it is for shoppers to buy from you the more conversions and repeat purchases are seen. By going the extra mile with simple strategies, it can enhance repeat purchases and a loyal customer base.
