Shopping cart abandonment is the eternal nemesis of e-commerce owners. It’s incredibly frustrating to move a shopper through the sales funnel only to lose them at the moment of truth – the checkout page!
In all fairness, a large portion of cart abandonments are simply a natural outcome of how shoppers browse e-commerce sites. Many of them will be window shopping or comparing prices or saving items for later or exploring gift options. These result in largely unavoidable cart abandonments; it is a part of the process.
The Baymard Institute’s list of 41 different studies, going all the way back to 2006, indicate the average online shopping cart abandonment rate to be 69.57%. To put this in perspective, e-commerce brands lose about $18B in sales revenue each year. Is there a way ecommerce brands can convert these lost opportunities? Oh, yes! These are the ways to reduce cart abandonment:
Use Exit Intent Pop-up!
There is no harm in trying to get their attention before they walk out. The Pop up could contain a discount code, a promo ad, offer a demo or trial or an invitation to stay connected.
The idea is to give them something compelling and irresistible, so they may stay and possibly consider completing the purchase they initiated. With an exit intent pop-up, a visitor’s mouse movements are usually tracked, and when the cursor moves outside the upper page boundary (because the tab bar is usually there), a pop-up window is displayed.
Be Transparent; Display All Charges Upfront!
Shipping costs, taxes, packaging costs, and other extra charges! These often make a customer drop the cart, if not disclosed earlier. There are few things more frustrating about shopping online than expecting to pay one price, only to discover you’re being stung with a volley of hidden costs, fees, and surcharges. Data from UPS suggests that, of all the costs associated with online retail, shipping costs are the most universally loathed. Consumers absolutely hate paying for shipping costs – so much so that it’s the single biggest reason for shopping cart abandonment. Below is a good example as to how you can display extra cost upfront:
One needs to show these charges while customer adds the product in the cart prominently. Post that, you may come across as dishonest and make the buying experience sore. Around 55% (researched by Baymard Institute) of customers bounce from a site just because of this reason.
Incentivise Based on Cart Value:
Who doesn’t like discounts while shopping and it becomes sweeter when there is an added discount just for adding few extra pounds to your cart? Incentivizing the customer on the basis of their cart total is a way where the customers would be delighted and would increase the checkout rates immensely. This would in return decrease your cart abandonment rates and start converting into actual revenue through sales.
Create A Sense of Urgency:
A sense of urgency on the page is bound to grab the attention of the customer. This brings about the fear of missing out on offers and discounts that they were keen on buying. And lets the customer know that whatever discount or promotional offer they have won’t last forever. One of the best ways to do this is with a countdown timer:
This is an example of static countdown timer where the buyer is intimated that the discount will be ended at a specific time/date.
Merchant can also provide a dynamic countdown timer which starts when the user first sees the campaign, rather than beginning on a specific date. This allows you to fairly create urgency for all of your site’s visitors and motivate hesitant buyers to go through the entire checkout process.
Retarget Cart Abandoners:
Some shoppers require multiple touch points before they are ready to commit to a purchase. Retargeting your cart abandoners with relevant ads helps keep the items they viewed or placed in their cart top of mind. The goal is to spur your customers to purchase by reminding them of the items they left in their shopping cart. Three out of four consumers notice retargeted ads—a percentage that’s encouraging considering that many people simply block out irrelevant ads. Of those consumers, over a quarter (26 percent) will click on the retargeted ad and return to your site.
Retarget Cart Abandoners:
Some shoppers require multiple touch points before they are ready to commit to a purchase. Retargeting your cart abandoners with relevant ads helps keep the items they viewed or placed in their cart top of mind. The goal is to spur your customers to purchase by reminding them of the items they left in their shopping cart. Three out of four consumers notice retargeted ads—a percentage that’s encouraging considering that many people simply block out irrelevant ads. Of those consumers, over a quarter (26 percent) will click on the retargeted ad and return to your site.
Personalize Follow-up Emails:
Do you follow-up with customers after checkout abandonment with cart recovery emails? Automated abandoned cart emails go a long way in showing the customers that you care. Pose a question in the email and make your consumer realize that the product is not worth losing out on.
Remind shoppers they haven’t completed their purchase and give them the ability to pick up where they left off. To streamline the process, consider populating a link that takes them to the exact stage they were at before they left. Offering a small discount or free shipping is also a good way to entice shoppers to revisit their purchase.
Brands that segment out different retargeting audience lists for people who behave differently have seen ROIs of more than 1,300 percent. The more personalized your retargeting is, the better it’ll perform, and more shoppers you can persuade to return to your site and complete their purchase.
Wear Your Security Badges with Pride:
Trust badges legitimize your website. A trust seal is associated with secure socket layers (SSL). It verifies the website and ensures that there is a secure transmission for customers to enter their credit/debit card details. Trust badges are small icons or markers that let your visitors know that your site is secure. These are things like a money-back guarantee stamp or secure payment options at the checkout.
it’s so important to use trust badges and social proof across your site–both before and during checkout because it instills a sense of trust in the shopper’s mind for the website they are buying from. As per Baymard, 35% of people will abandon a site if they don’t see security badges or feel it isn’t secure. The badges are small logos that look like this:
Conclusion:
The average card abandonment rate is quite high and may be unsettling. But it is certainly an issue that can be corrected and mitigated.
It would be nice to live in a world where a 100% conversion rate is achievable, right? But the fact is, your ecommerce site is going to experience some level of cart abandonment.
The important thing is to determine what that rate is, understand what’s contributing to the cart abandonment, and start putting in place strategies to recoup your lost sales. Addressing these key points should help you reduce your cart abandonment rate and redirect a good portion of shoppers that don’t initially complete their purchase.
What tops your list as the reason for cart abandonment among all these? Leave a comment below.
Also, email us at cs@qubriux.com where we help you to solve your cart abandonment issues with the help of AI & Data Science and make sure you achieve rapid revenues in no time.
Related Read: 10 Things to Learn from Amazon for the eCommerce Merchant.