Are You Losing 70% of Sales? How to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment
If current website sales are $10,000 per month and you can improve shopping cart abandonment rate by just 10% you would end up earning an additional $12,000 in sales for the year!
In case you are new to this concept, the official shopping cart abandonment rate definition is the loss of customers who enter the shopping cart or checkout portion of your site but do not end up making a purchase, for whatever reason. This is like a person who comes into your store, picks up a product and heads to the till but doesn’t end up buying.
On Average, 68% of Customers Abandon the Shopping Cart
The most documented online shopping cart abandonment average rate is 67.91% according to Baymard Institute and based on 27 different studies analyzing e-commerce shopping cart abandonment. This means that nearly 7 in 10 people who come into your store, interact with your product and show intention to purchase end up backing out.
In this article we are going to take a brief look at the reasons for shopping cart abandonment, what causes shopping cart abandonment and how to decrease shopping cart abandonment in order to grow your sales.
So why do web buyers abandon shopping carts?
Top Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment
- High shipping costs or unexpected costs
- Just browsing/ Not ready to purchase
- Website navigation too complicated
- High product price
- Want to save produce for later consideration
- Did not clearly mention shipping costs
- No guest checkout option
- Needs too much information
- Complex checkout process
- Website is too slow
- Process was taking too long
- Pay extra for taxes
- Do not have enough payment options
- Slow shipping
- Spam with offers
- Website crashed
- Just comparison shopping
- Shopping cart technical problems
- The prices was too high.
- Payment issues
Best Practices for Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Now that you’ve read the post popular reasons for leaving a shopping cart without buying your mind should be racing with ways to try to stop these objections from happening. Here is a brief list of best practices to get you going.
- Make a secure shopping cart and add 3rd party verification seals.
- Add a quick shipping calculator to the website.
- Make sure your site hides or displays current quantities of products, to eliminate the chance of a product being out of stock when the person goes to the shopping cart.
- Make sure your shopping cart is compatible with all browsers.
- Add a guest checkout option.
- Remove or decrease website navigation during the checkout process.
- Keep data input errors to a minimum (accept various formats for entering phone numbers, etc)
- Make the layout design easy for the eye to follow
- Remove multiple calls to action buttons that can detract from the checkout.
- Show the progress of checkout (ex. Step 2 of 3).
- Put your discount code box during early stages.
- Don’t ask for unnecessary information.
- Keep cross-sells and up-sells during checkout to a minimum.
- Consider quantity-based discounts such as 10% off or free shipping over $75.
- Make your return policy easy to find.
- Offer support during the process.
- Send an automated shopping cart abandonment recovery email.
- Consider an email recovery campaign if your e-Comm platform has the capability.
- Keep your shipping costs competitive and reasonable.
- Offer various payment methods.
Do you know your shopping cart abandonment rate or even how to track or calculate shopping cart abandonment rate? Our Analytics and Conversion Optimization team can help you set up the proper tracking to measure ecommerce shopping cart abandonment and start recovering sales from customers from leaving!
Give us a call at 1-888-262-6687 or complete our quick contact form for more information.
