How to Reduce eCommerce Cart Abandonment and Recapture Your Desired Leads

Do you want to reduce cart abandonment on your online shop? If you are searching for some sustainable solutions to resolve this issue successfully, then you have landed in the right place.

Cart Abandonment- the saddest but unavoidable fact of eCommerce life. As a buyer, you may also leave your carts idle several times. But now being an online retailer, you may wish that more customers would complete their purchase on your site instead of leaving the cart behind.

If you are in eCommerce business then you probably implement a different number of strategies to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Maybe you are successful or still struggling to reach the results that you are aiming for. However, you need to go in a planned way if you want lower abandonment rates.

Today we will discuss 10+ proven tips and tricks that may influence your customers to complete their transaction on your site. And, in the end, we will share some actionable strategies to recapture your lost sales after cart abandonment.

What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Shopping cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts a buying process for an online order (at least add products to their cart) but walking away before completing the purchase.

Why Do People Abandon Their Carts

Visitors abandon cart for a number of reasons. They might be just browsing, comparing the price, counting the cost, observing the process, identifying the other expenses, or just forget to complete their purchase. As an eShop owner, it’s your responsibility to minimize the number of abandoned carts and recover lost sales as much as possible.

Suppose, you go to the near super shop, filling up the cart with some grocery products for daily usages. Suddenly you get distracted by a little girl playing with balloons outside the shop. And you start giggling with her letting the purchase undone. Finally, leave the place without buying anything. However, this scenario is quite unusual in real life. But it’s quite common in the online arena.

On average, over 77% of buyers are leaving their shopping cart without completing a purchase. As they come to your eShop, start shopping, then close the tab to watch the trailer of Jocker and never return. In that case, you have a lot of areas to navigate and improve. That you can increase returning user’s growth and regain your lost sales from cart abandonment.

The main reasons for cart abandonment are given bellow:

1. Unexpected shipping cost
2. Expensive products
3. Conducting research to buy later
4. Comparing the prices
5. Extra costs like tax, vat or others
6. Poor website performance
7. Save the cart for future
8. The long and complex checkout process
9. Need to create an account before purchase
10. Concern about payment security
11. Do not have enough payment options
12. The return policy or after-sale service wasn’t satisfactory

However, you need to understand the reasons why your customers feel walking away rather than completing the transaction. Otherwise, all the efforts of you and your team go to the drain and you will not get your desired revenue in your vault.

How to Reduce eCommerce Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges for online traders to overcome. It’s really annoying when customers come to your site, add items to their shopping cart but then leave without completing the checkout process. It may bother you and sometimes makes you frustrated.

Shopping cart abandonment accounts for $18 billion in lost revenue each year.

According to 2019 data, the average global shopping cart abandonment rate for online businesses is 69.57%. In 2020 eCommerce businesses continue this battle with cart abandonment. However, don’t get disheartened with this daunting number. You can still prevent this situation by making the user experience better than before.

Offer Free Shipping

Extra Shipping cost is supposed to be the main cause of shopping cart abandonment. Research of B2C e-commerce sites has stated that “unexpected cost” is the biggest reason for shopping cart abandonment. And most of the time customers finds additional shipping charge as an extra cost.

Many online sellers have noticed a huge boost in their revenue after running a promotion for free shipping. You can offer free shopping including a minimum purchase threshold like $20, $50, or $100. In that case, some buyers will more likely to add items to their carts.

So, while updating your marketing strategy, you may offer free shipping for a certain amount of purchase or time period. It will provoke your visitors to take quick action and complete their checkout process immediately. However, you can also revise your product cost for adjusting the expenditure. So that you can drag their attention to your online store without doing any loss.

Use Psychology for Pricing 

Customers are always concern about their expenditure. They want to spend where they feel they got the best product at a lower price. Here you can play with your customer’s brain. Manage your product pricing in a way that hits your visitor’s mind. And they fall into your checkout funnel immediately. You can tag your products at $2.99 instead of $3.00. So, it will be easy to drive their attention indeed.

Also, you can offer different choices for your customers that they can compare the products and take their decisions.

Also, people hate surprises at checkout. So, there is a high possibility to through the cart undone. If they find extra costs like shipping, taxes or other service costs added to their receipt during checkout. Perhaps, shop owners can display high price product next to a low price product. It can be a great way to nudge a visitor towards checkout.

Effective CTA Buttons

Online traders can use actionable CTAs (call-to-action) to their storefronts for increasing conversions. An attention-grabbing CTA can be both highlighted text or appealing buttons. Through these actionable points, you can refer to the next step that you want your visitors to take.

Get the CTAs easily visible for the visitors. Place them where visitors often navigate and can see them clearly. You can insert them above the fold, below the fold or anywhere you think it will be fruitful. Do A/B testing for observing the impacts after placing a CTA and take further decisions based on it. You can continuously change the text, place, color or texture to see the changing behavior of the visitors.

Keep the CTAs short and influential. They should be included:

• Action words/verbs such as “Buy,” “Shop,” “Grab The Deal,” “Get” etc.
• Urgency words such as “Now,” “Today,” “Last Day”
• Essential assistance like “free PDF,” “Free Customer Service,” “Expert training,” and so on

After driving traffic to the site, the biggest challenge is to convert the traffic into customers. In that case, You can easily boost the conversion rate by optimizing your CTAs.

Improve the User Experience on Your Site

Give your customers a seamless browsing experience. To do so, you can keep the navigation easy to surf. That user can get their desired items quickly. Also, arrange the products by category. So people can directly enter their required products area.

According to the reports of Forrester Research, you can increase customer conversion rates to 400% by developing a frictionless UX design. Apart from this, you should take good care of the following factors during developing and optimizing your eCommerce site:

• Fast site loading speed
• Simple website design and easy navigation
• Use clear and high-resolution product images
• Responsive website design
• Simple and easy checkout options
• Offer virtual assistance
• Secured for all transaction
• Works perfectly on all major web browsers

To survive in this competitive business world you have to make your customers experience memorable. So, help the prospects to find information or complete a transaction as quickly as possible. 

Mobile-Friendly Site

Mobile plays an important role in the success of the eCommerce business. As day by day people more likely to do shopping on their portable devices. In fact, there is nothing to be astonished.

Next time when you go to any crowded place like public transport, restaurant or just walking down the street, take a moment and look around you—practically everyone is on their phones. Thus, the rapid growth of mobile eCommerce increases the necessity of responsive websites.

Almost 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on a smartphone. And it is estimated that mobile eCommerce will acquire 54% of total eCommerce sales by 2021.

If your customers find it difficult to browse your site on their mobile and tab then there is a high possibility to leave the check out process undone. So, make a responsive site that will work smoothly on all sized devices. You can build mobile apps as well to give a better service to your users.

Simplify the Checkout

People love simplicity and want to achieve more taking less hassle. As an online trader, you have to consider this human nature. And keep the shopping process as easy as possible. So, the shoppers can complete their transaction effortlessly.

In short, don’t make the checkout process long and confusing. A recent study says that almost 28% of buyers abandon their carts behind for checkout annoyances. So, minimize the form elements that a customer needs to fill up before purchasing. Ask only the necessary information that requires only a few seconds to attend.

Moreover, streamline your site navigation easy and simple. Therefore, users can complete their desired action using less number of screens within a minimum time limit.

Offer Multiple Payment Options

Besides, a simple checkout process your site should support multiple payment options. Firstly include all the popular gateways to make your customer’s life easy. And then gradually add all the possible payment systems to influence more people to finish their transactions on your site.

According to Baymard, some people leave checkouts because they don’t find their desired payment method (8 percent) or because their credit card is declined (4 percent).

In addition, people often feel insecure to share their payment information online. As a result, the buyers leave the site without buying anything. So, invest a good time to interact with your possible leads and gain customer trust for your eCommerce. Apart from this, you should accept multiple currencies. So, people over the globe can interact with your site trouble-free. Remember, more options will generate more prospects.

Help Your Customer

It will be a great way to stick your buyers for a long time on your site if you can offer virtual assistance or related documentation for them. Buyers also expect convenience while browsing an eCommerce site. They may have queries about product availability, their usages, side-effects or any information regarding the products or services.

LiverPerson found that 83% of online buyers want help while they are on site. Over half (51%) said that they are more likely to make a purchase if they had customer support such as live chat during the session.

In that case, live chatting is a proven way to communicate with your leads directly. So, offer more support to your visitors throughout the shopping experience with live chat. And notice a remarkable lift in your sales.

Keep the Cart Visible

Keeping the shopping cart visible is an effective way to remind your customers to buy. After spending a long time on the store they might forget altogether what they have added to the cart. If the cart is not visible. You can simply use a cart icon at the top of the screen. And it will expand and shows the added items when customers click or hover over it.

Here you can see the cart icon of Amazon. It shows the number of items inside it. So, shoppers can easily recall what they have already added and need further.

Also, keep the “Add to cart” button easily visible for mobile shoppers. That they can check out faster.

Enable Guest Checkout

As we have mentioned above keep the check out process easy and simple. Customers are always in a rush and don’t have enough time to fill up the boring long-form during checking out. In this situation, forcing them to register before checking out lowers the conversion and increases the bounce rate.

So, don’t push them to create an account prior to checking out. It may discourage them to continue the process any further.

WordPress supports some default functionalities to make cart abandonment WooCommerce easy. If you are running a WooCommerce site then all you have to do is check one box to enable Guest Checkout.

You can ask for signing up after completing the purchase.

Consequently, you should consider the above facts while optimizing your online store for buyers. It will help you to fix eCommerce cart abandonment accordingly. Furthermore, you can offer some coupons and discounts for your users to boost sales growth rapidly.

Perhaps applying all these tactics, still, you will get some visitors on your site who skip the purchase after filling up the carts. But don’t get disappointed. Yet you have some effective ways to regain these customers. Reach them through a smart marketing approach and convince them for completing the purchase indeed.

How to Recover Lost Sales after Cart Abandonment

An abandoned cart doesn’t indicate the end of the customer-store relationship. If they don’t provide you with their email address still you have the possibility to reach them out. You can successfully recover their cart through retargeting ads or push notifications.

Utilize the Power of Retargeting Ads

When it’s about cart recovery then cookies will work as your rescuer. These small data files will provide you the essential information related to your customers. Such as their behavior on your site, interests, geography, and others. Later you can use these data for ad networks, like Google Ads, Facebook, or Taboola.

So, when those people will browse completely a different website they see the add for those products they have left behind.

Retargeting ads are 76 percent more likely to be clicked than a random display ad.

So, there is no alternative to run retargeting ad campaigns to improve checkout conversion rates and avoid cart abandonment.

Send Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails

An abandoned cart email is a follow-up message sent to the users who have left a site after adding items to their carts. These emails are typically sent to those who have completed certain stages of checking out process. And then just exit the site without buying.

According to Salesforce, you can recover 60 percent of sales if you send a cart abandonment email within a day.

Therefore you can send a reminder email within 24 hours to the potential leads and remind them what they have left behind. Also, you can offer a discount or special offer in the following emails too. The email open rate is significantly high for cart recovery emails.

The largest online retail company Amazon also used to send abandoned cart mail to its visitors.

However, it is also important to track if shoppers have already changed their minds. Or complete the purchase after or before sending the first recovery mail or the subsequent emails.

If you are running your site in WordPress then a simple yet powerful plugin can help you to build beautiful email templates. The weMail allows you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.

Pop-up Message in Your Site

Online traders can use a pop-up message to reduce cart abandonment remarkably. An abandonment cart message is an interactive overlay message displayed to a user when he/she is about to leave the site after adding some items to the cart. If you can show the messages at the right time then it will convince more users to stay on your site, collect potential leads, gather fruitful insights, and increase sales as well.

You can use this exit-intent pop-up message anywhere on your site, including the add-to-cart and checkout page. 

A renown company Chubbies use this strategy to reduce their cart abandonment rate. They use the following pop-up message to inform the details about the upcoming sale and what would be they missing if don’t complete the purchase now!

Additionally, it can be a great way to capture mail addresses from your valuable prospects. So, you can send them a reminder message later and they can start their shopping journey where they left off.

And most importantly, you don’t need to offer discounts or free shipping every time to achieve the goal.

Save the Cart

Most of the online shoppers are comparison shoppers. They browse several sites for the same products, observe the final price after adding all the cost including the product price, shipping charge, discounts, coupons, and others. Then also consider some other factors before making the final decision.

KISSmetrics found that 24% of people who leave the cart behind want to save their cart for future consideration.

There is a high chance that those customers will come back to your site again who have not checked out yet. So, their shopping carts should be saved that they can continue again where they left.

These groundbreaking techniques will help you to convert the abandoning site visitors into loyal advisors. drops out the process

Fun Stats & Facts About Shopping Cart Abandonment

Acquire Your Lost Customers by Minimizing Cart Abandonment

E-commerce business is growing at a spectacular rate. If you run an eCommerce business then there is a high possibility to lose customers due to cart abandonment. It’s an unavoidable fact. But you can minimize the rate by utilizing the above tips and tricking.

Not to mention that you can not convince all the customers to complete the checkout process. There would be always some people who will not complete the circle. All you can do that take good care of those influencing factors that may lower the customer bounce rate drastically.

Don’t forget to share your view with us in the comment section below!