Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment With These 6 Practical Fixes

Running an eCommerce store and dealing with high shopping cart abandonment rates? That can be a frustrating position for you and your business, as no one likes to have their customers successfully fill the cart with items and then abandon the cart as is without even beginning the checkout process.

There could be a number of reasons why you as an eCommerce business is failing to make those sales leaving you with abandoned carts. However, it does boil down to the user experience that you are providing. At least on your part.

Good news for you! There are plenty of ways you can remedy this issue and we have compiled a list of helpful and practical solutions.

Before we dive into the problem, let us understand it first.

What Exactly Is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

In its entirety, shopping cart abandonment is an act where online shoppers successfully browse your site, add items to their respective shopping carts, but before they can check out and purchase those items – they leave the site.

As frustrating that is – there are multiple ways to resolve this and we will be diving into them in detail. Before that, you need to get to the root of the matter – which is to track your shopping cart abandonment. For this, you have tools like Google Analytics Enhanced eCommerce tracking that allows you to track cart abandonment rates.

You can also explore other tools that allow you more tracking and insights into your abandonment issue – like CartStack, MonsterInsights, Rejoiner, and more.

1) Make use of exit-intent popups

Exit-intent popups are a great way to send an enticing offer just when the user is about to leave the page. These pop-ups have proven to be useful in reducing cart abandonment rates.

So what do they contain and how do they work? Simple. These popups contain messages usually with an enticing offer, discount, or other information that encourages them to stay on the page and hopefully make purchases.

Take the below image as an example. Such an exit-intent popup strategy helps you retain customers and reduce your cart abandoned rates.

2) Allow guest check-outs

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and ask how many times you have abandoned an eCommerce website yourself after it asked you to create an account? Probably every single time.

No one wants to browse, add items, and then instead of proceeding to the checkout process, have to fill out a form and then go back to the checkout process. It’s a hassle that users avoid and this lead to them abandoning the cart.

The entire idea of your eCommerce store is to provide a convenient user experience where the steps to complete a task are less and simple. This is why it is advised to allow people to checkout as a guest. You can ask them to sign up after they have successfully made their purchase.

3) Speed-up the checking out process

We cannot stress the fact the entire experience of online shopping should be created in a way that reduces the requirement of input from the users to bare-minimum. The same applies to the checkout process. Since we are discussing remedies for shopping cart abandonment, you need to reduce those extra pages that users have to go through in order to complete the process.

The simpler the end-process is, the more user feels comfortable in proceeding further and completing the checkout.

For example, when asking for important details, you can reduce those details to the ones that matter – that include an email address for email marketing, card information, and then enabling the pay button below. That’s it!

4) Make the shopping cart visible

Sometimes, users do not plan on making purchases at the very moment and simply add items to cart for saving purposes. Now, how will they remember they have items in their cart saved from previous sessions if they cannot see the cart when they re-visit?

In order to remind the users of saved items within their shopping cart, you need to place the cart icon along with a number displaying the items within at a place where it is visible throughout the session.

Consider the Amazon cart as an example.

Amazon plays this great trick that reduces their cart abandonment by a large margin – as you can see in the picture above. By displaying the shopping cart icon in the eye’s view – they make sure you know how many items are in your cart at a simple glance reminding you that you haven’t completed your purchase.

5) Offer free shipping

Yes, we had to include the obvious. But there is a catch to this. Often times, shoppers are thrown off by the extra charges that may come along with the original price of the items selected – like sales tax, any hidden fee, or item customization charges, etc. Although it is best to eliminate these surprise charges and being transparent from the beginning by adding a shopping calculator to your product pages, you can offer free shipping to solidify the deal.

Who doesn’t love free shipping? You can even mention free shipping in your exit-intent popups to lure them back in.

Free shipping offers instills confidence in your brand and users are less likely to go elsewhere for better deals and pricing.

6) Apply remarketing on cart abandoners

Remarketing is an online advertising method that allows you to target users with customized ads that recently visited your site.

Now remarketing ads work great to remind cart abandoners about their incomplete order through those ads being displayed on other websites or social media. For this, Google Analytics allows you to gather relevant data on your abandoners and potential customers, so you can target them better on various platforms including social media.

Did You Know?

• 21% of online shoppers based in the US abandon their cart only because of the complicated checkout process.
• A better checkout design can help a large scale eCommerce site gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate.
• According to the statistics, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.57%. Which is a lot.

Source: Baymard Institute.

Bonus Tip: By now you have learned the practical solutions that reduce your cart abandonment rates. However, one of the key factors that you need to pay special attention to is creating an eCommerce website that is mobile responsive with a seamless user experience incorporated into the design.

For this, you can contact a reliable software company in Houston that has a great track record of revamping eCommerce sites and making them user-friendly along with applying shopping cart/checkout optimization techniques for maximum conversions.

You may want to check: Most Common eCommerce Design Mistakes Killing Your Business