What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
In ecommerce, the term abandonment refers to when a shopper leaves a webpage without completing the desired action. One of the most prevalent types of abandonment is shopping cart abandonment, which refers to users who add products to the virtual cart but leave before completing their purchase.
High cart abandonment rates have historically presented a major challenge for ecommerce brands. Approximately 70% of users who add items to their online shopping cart leave without completing a purchase.
Download Now: 4 Stages of Ecommerce Abandonment
Why Do Online Shoppers Abandon Carts?
Even though huge innovations have taken place in online retail over the years, the cart abandonment rate has remained virtually unchanged.
So, why do so many users leave their orders behind? While an easy answer would be nice, research shows it’s due to a confluence of factors.
As you can see nearly 50% of abandoning users left because of shipping charges. While many sites view shipping costs as a necessary evil, many users vehemently dislike them.
In a similar vein, many users abandon their purchase because they don’t want to create an account. While sites obviously need some information to successfully fulfill an order, for many, creating an account feels unnecessary and ultimately seems like too much of a hassle.
Let’s talk about how you can prevent cart abandonment in the first place. While every site and audience is different, the following 7 strategies have been thoroughly tested by the team at UpSellit and have been proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
7 Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
1. Optimize Your Product Pages
2. Let Shoppers Edit Carts
3. Offer to Save Carts for Later
4. Offer Guest Checkout
5. Simplify Your Checkout Process
6. Offer More Payment Options
7. Harness the Power of Free Shipping
1. Optimize Your Product Pages
Ecommerce product pages have a tough job. They need to entice users while accurately conveying product information, all while answering questions before they’re asked. A page that fails in any of these essential functions is unlikely to convert users effectively – so how can you optimize your product pages?
Keep Text Short and Sweet
When creating a product description, it’s vital not to let your desire to sell outshine the actual product information. Keep the tone of your descriptions consistent with your overall brand voice.
In addition, make sure to include product specs such as height, width, and shipping weight. You can intertwine features with creative messaging to paint a picture for the consumer about the product. Short, concise, accurate descriptions tend to see the best results.
Focus on High Quality Images
When selecting product images, you should aim to leave nothing to the user’s imagination. The goal of a product page is to make the user feel as comfortable purchasing online as they would in a physical store.
While less is often more when it comes to copy, provide as many photos as necessary to give the user the full picture.
Social Proof
Customer reviews are one of the best ways to instill shoppers with a sense of confidence. This kind of social proof is invaluable to retail, as 84% of shoppers trust reviews as much as they’d trust a friend’s recommendation.
If you’re having trouble gathering reviews for your products, this is a great time to begin a lifecycle campaign.
2. Let Shoppers Edit Carts
Many customers use their cart as a place to store items they simply want to save for later. However, there’s a key design flaw on many sites that creates a problem – the inability to edit a cart.
Let’s say you’re shopping for a coffee table. You find three you like, and add each of them to your cart so you can keep track of your options. After further consideration, you decide on one. Now, you’re ready to checkout – only to find out that you can’t remove the other two choices.
While this may sometimes encourage users to buy more, it often has the opposite effect. The fact is you don’t need 3 coffee tables, and now you’re frustrated. If you have to start all over again, you may just throw up your hands and decide you never really needed a coffee table to begin with.
While these issues seem small, minor in-cart inconveniences can be extremely frustrating for consumers and costly for brands. By allowing for in-cart changes until the final stages of checkout, you’re giving shoppers flexibility that they will appreciate.
3. Offer to Save Carts for Later
No matter what strategies you use, some shoppers simply won’t be ready to convert on their first visit. This is especially true for shoppers on mobile devices, who may be more easily distracted, or may not have immediate access to their payment information.
An excellent mitigation strategy for this scenario is to simply offer to save a user’s cart for later. To use this tactic, ask the shopper to enter their email address, which will allow you to recreate their cart in their inbox.
This solution allows users to complete checkout whenever they’d like from any device. In addition, this is an excellent way to bolster your email list and remarketing efforts, which we will discuss in more detail later.
4. Offer Guest Checkout
When a shopper orders from you, it’s natural that you want to get to know them. However, while there’s some information you have to gather, like their physical address and payment information, it’s easy to go a bit overboard. In fact, many ecommerce sites require users to create an account on the site to proceed with their order.
While this may seem perfectly sensible to a business, users often see this as a major inconvenience, especially for those who are shopping on a mobile device. Ideally, a site should put as few barriers as possible between shoppers and conversions.
Guest checkout provides a happy medium that’s good for everyone – shoppers can skip the lengthy signup process while still offering everything that’s required for the order to be shipped successfully. You can even give users the option to create an account after their order is over.
5. Simplify Your Checkout Process
Have you ever noticed how much longer it takes to check out online than it does a physical store? While an in-person register transaction generally takes just a minute or two, it’s not uncommon for ecommerce checkouts to take between 5 and 10 minutes.
While this is understandable given the amount of information a site needs to carry out the order, it’s this moment of truth (or, more accurately, 5-10 minutes of truth) that often spells the end for online transactions.
Although checkouts, as a whole, have gotten a bit shorter over the years, they still average about 5 pages. While this may not seem like much, it can feel endless for a user on a mobile device and add friction to the customer journey.
One Page Checkout
Many merchants have found success by simply putting the full checkout form on one page. While this may seem like a lot of information, most shoppers appreciate not having to navigate through multiple pages to finish their order.
This is also a great opportunity to evaluate the information you require from users. For example, do you really need their phone number to complete their order?
If you haven’t already, consider saving users’ payment information for faster checkout in the future. Each of these strategies will ameliorate problems associated with checkout abandonment.
Accordion Checkout
Another popular option is the accordion checkout – a one-page checkout that expands and contracts sections as they’re completed. This allows for better organization, improves clarity, and can appear less daunting than a traditional checkout page.
Each of these solutions helps reduce friction created by the checkout process.
6. Offer More Payment Options
Another common cause of abandonment is a lack of available payment methods. While most ecommerce transactions happen via a debit or credit card, additional options can help ease customer concerns about privacy and mitigate price sensitivity.
Paypal
Paypal allows customers to pay for their items without having to enter their credit card information directly on a site. This payment option has grown in popularity among consumers with privacy and security concerns.
Payment Plans
Companies like Affirm offer financing that allows users to buy immediately and pay over time. Unlike a credit card, these small loans don’t impact a user’s credit score, and often offer interest rates lower than a typical credit card.
Some of UpSellit’s clients have seen success by offering Affirm financing on abandonment. This can ease price sensitivity without requiring an additional incentive.
7. Harness the Power of Free Shipping
Even though they’re essential to doing business online, many users see shipping fees as “sneaky” or “unnecessary.” Add that to the fact that 75% of consumers expect shipping to be free, and it’s easy to see why these fees hold a special place of contempt in the hearts of consumers.
The reasons for this are more psychological than rational. People resent paying for shipping because it feels “tacked on” – even if the fee is more than offset by other offers on your site.
However, there is a bright side to this phenomenon- because consumers tend to overvalue the cost of shipping, they absolutely love getting free shipping. Of course, businesses don’t really want to pay shipping costs for every order, so how can we square these two facts to create an optimized conversion strategy?
Thresholds
One of the best ways to make free shipping profitable is to implement an incentive threshold. For example, one popular choice is to offer free shipping on orders over $50. You can complement this strategy with a gamified progress bar that shows users how much more they need to unlock free shipping.
This method actively increases AOV by encouraging users to add more to their carts, just by using a relatively inexpensive incentive that’s highly valued by shoppers.
Recover Lost Shoppers with Abandoned Cart Emails
While the strategies above will almost certainly lower your abandonment rate, some users are still going to leave without completing their order. Fortunately, you can still target and convert these shoppers using email remarketing.
Abandonment emails can utilize a variety of strategies to encourage shoppers to return and complete their order, but two of the most popular strategies incorporate incentives and urgency messaging.
Remarketing incentives don’t need to be large to be effective. Even a small discount or gift with purchase is often enough to convince a user on the fence to complete their purchase.
Likewise, urgency can be an extremely effective remarketing tool. Showing users the number of remaining items in stock or the number of other people considering the item can motivate a shopper to respond to the call to action and return to checkout.
Combatting Shopping Cart Abandonment
Across our industry, shopping cart abandonment remains extremely high. However, by actively engaging users, adapting to their preferences, and using incentives strategically, you can significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment rates and dramatically increase your revenue.
Looking for More Ways to Increase Conversions?
Ecommerce is about more than just a one-time conversion. By keeping your audience engaged, you can build a relationship that keeps them coming back for more. To unlock conversion strategies for your website, email hello@upsellit.com, or check out UpSellit’s Site-Abandonment Infographic to discover why shoppers leave at each stage of the funnel and how to keep them on track to conversion.
