Cart abandonment – grow your revenue

What is cart abandonment and how will it have an impact on my business?

Our websites are our virtual showrooms. It's where we establish trust with our customers, showboat our offers and create opportunities for prospects to join our lists.

Analytics allows us to track how long people spend on pages, where they came from, what they looked at and when they left. This collation of data gives us the insight we need to provide better value for our customers. 

Cart abandonment plays an important role in our sales cycle which is why it has the potential to contribute to our revenue if we know what to do.

This blog is to help you firstly understand cart abandonment and why people do it and then to look at why it matters and what we can do to reduce it.

What is cart abandonment?

Abandonment is when a prospect visits your page and then leaves without taking action. Cart abandonment is when prospects add things to their online shopping cart and leave without completing the purchase.

69.57% is the average online shopping cart abandonment rate. It isn’t a small number. 

If you sell homemade pet bowls for £10 each and you have 100 visitors to your website today and 30.43% purchase a pet bowl then you’re making £304.30 and potentially losing £695.70 in abandoned carts. 

“41% of shoppers have abandoned a transaction during checkout in the past year, compared to 24% who have walked away from a purchase in a physical store”

Think about how many times you pile things into a cart and abandon it. Much more likely to happen online because you probably won’t leave a full trolley in your local supermarket. Which is why eCommerce businesses need to have strategies in place to reduce the likelihood of loss.

Why do people abandon their carts?

The why of cart abandonment is as important as the data behind it. Understanding the reason behind your customers actions will give you a much more succinct approach to guiding them to purchasing rather than abandoning ship! 

Let’s consider some of the core reasons why people abandon their carts;

High shipping costs

There is nothing worse than bundling everything you want into your cart. Perusing the website, finding just what you’re looking for and then getting ready to check out only to see that the shipping cost is waaaay more than you’d normally expect to pay. In the retail sector 23% of consumers have an issue with shipping costs. 

Lack of trust

If your consumers don’t trust your company or don’t see you as reputable business. No one is going to hand over their credit card information to a website they don’t deem as trustworthy especially for a product they’re not entirely sure they need. If you aren’t trustworthy then they may go to a competitors website or prefer to go in store. 15% of retail consumers opt to buy in-store instead of online. 

They were just looking

I do this ALL the time. It must be so frustrating for businesses on the other side of it. Low buying intent is a massive cause of cart abandonment, in fact in the retail industry 34% were just looking and had no intention of making a purchase. 

Payment options

6% of retail consumers abandon their carts because of the lack of payment options. Argos offer credit plans for buy now pay later where you can purchase your goodies and only pay in 3 or 6 months. Klarna is now live on big retail websites such as Very and ASOS, Klarna lets you pay your cart total off in 3 instalments as opposed to all in one hit. 

Price comparisons

Consumers love a bargain! In flight or fright when it comes to high prices they pick flight and you’ve lost them to the great abyss. 18% of retail customers abandon their carts because they want to compare prices. 

Technical issues

We live in a digital world and technical issues will crop up from time to time. 4% of retail customers abandon shopping carts because of a technical glitch. There are few things more frustrating than having to try more than once to pay for something!

It’s too long winded

Nobody wants to have to deliver their life story in exchange for a product or service. Life is busy and we don’t want to fill in webforms and complete all sorts of tests to prove we can purchase something. Complexity is a big cart abandonment culprit!

Rather than a frantic lack of understanding we now have a little more insight into why our customers are behaving in a way that pushes them to abandon their carts and cost us money. 

What can we do about cart abandonment?

How do we stop our customers from falling prey to cart abandonment? 

We helped one client reach their financial goals by using several campaigns, the most instrumental being cart abandonment. By offering a coupon at checkout we made them over £10,000 from traffic that was leaving their site. You can read the full case study here.

So what can we do? We can help make it easier for users to stick around, commit to the purchase and become customers. 

Overcoming your customer’s objections before they become problems will help your customers build trust in your business and feel supported in their purchasing decision. 

Here are some ways you can provide solutions:

• Offer free shipping promotions over peak periods or let them qualify for free shipping should they reach a certain threshold.
• Returns policies really help customers feel secure in their purchase because it isn’t such a final decision should they change their minds. 80% of shoppers don’t complete a purchase because of a poor returns policy!
• Testimonials and reviews build trust and help your customers believe in your reputation.
• Incentives to buy immediately encourage decisiveness! You can offer coupons or discounts at checkout.
• There are so many payment options nowadays so offer your customers a nice choice so they feel comfortable with how they will make payment.
• One or two steps is much more effective than long winded checkout processes. Make it easy for them to say yes. Being forced to create an account during checkout is the second highest reason for abandonment.
• Monitor your checkout process and review your analytics to keep it running smoothly and to avoid any glitches. Checkout optimisation could increase conversions by 35.62%.
  
  

All these considerations will improve your cart abandonment losses and will improve your customers experience overall.

A key strategy for cart recovery is cart abandonment emails. These are emails that you send out after someone has added something to their cart and then abandoned it last minute. Obviously only possible if you have their contact but very successful if you do.

“28.3% of online sales revenue is generated from successful abandoned cart recovery emails”

Cart abandonment emails are a gentle reminder that you’ve left something in your cart and a great way to offer an incentive such as a discount, free shipping or a loyalty program. 

If you’re not sure how a cart abandonment campaign would look, have a read of this technical blog, this will show you best practice for Infusionsoft but there’s no reason the flow wouldn’t work on an alternative platform. 

We’re experts in campaign strategy, conversion copywriting and implementation. We teach this (along with many other areas of marketing automation) in our academy.

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