22 Jan
Abandoned cart means you are losing your potential orders and customers which is a great deal of pain for website owners.
According to a study, 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Think about that. For every 100 potential customers, 70 of them will leave without purchasing. How much would your revenues increase if you were capturing those sales instead of losing them?
Cart abandonment stats refer to customers that have added items to their shopping carts, but haven’t gone on to buy. They may have entered checkout before bailing out, but many won’t have made it that far.
In this article let study about shopping cart abandonment statistics to explain why people abandon their carts and what online retailers can do about it.
What is an abandoned cart ?
When a user adds a product to the online shopping cart of an e-commerce site but doesn’t proceed to checkout and complete the purchase. Users may abandon because they aren’t ready to buy. Instead, they are using their cart as more of a “wish list” as they shop around and compare prices.
What is the average shopping cart abandonment rate?
Research by Baymard Institute shows the average cart abandonment rate differs by device, with mobile and tablet devices having the highest percentage of shoppers hitting the exit button on a checkout page:
- Desktop: 69.75%
- Mobile: 85.65%
- Tablets: 80.74%
The location of your customers also plays a role in how likely they are to abandon their online shopping carts, too. Some 86.15% of Spanish shopping baskets are abandoned midway through. On the other side of the scale, shoppers in the Netherlands have the lowest abandonment rate at 65.49%.
Certain items also have bigger drop-offs. Items in women’s knitwear, leather goods, and lingerie categories are most prone to “website window-shoppers”. Unsurprisingly, December is the month where cart abandonment is at its highest. Black Friday and holiday sales mean more people are shopping (hence the increase in cart abandonment).
Lots of factors play a role in cart abandonment, so it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people adding items to their online cart won’t complete a purchase for some reason or another. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it. Keep reading to understand the main drivers of shopping cart abandonment.
Why do people abandon their online shopping carts?
Here are some reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts:
1. Extra costs are too high
For more than half of online shoppers, free delivery is the incentive that’s most effective in convincing them to buy something from an online store. That’s shortly followed by coupons and discounts (41%).
Cost is clearly important to modern-day shoppers, so it’ll come as no surprise to learn that any extra costs tacked on at checkout are a leading cause of cart abandonment.
Extra costs including shipping, taxes, and extra fees aren’t always made obvious to a customer. When they head to their online cart and see those fees added on top of each product price, it causes 49% of cart abandoners to exit.
2. An account is required
First-time customers to your online store want a fast, friction-free checkout experience. That doesn’t happen when they’re being asked to create an account.
Time-consuming fields, like your birthday and phone number, aren’t essential to buying an item online. For some shoppers, it’s frustrating to have to give all of that information for a single purchase which is why almost a quarter (24%) of cart abandonment happens because the site asked them to create an account.
(Even if someone has created an account before, remembering their login isn’t an easy job. The average internet user has 100 passwords.)
Offering a guest checkout option or an accelerated checkout option that remembers a customer can be enough to solve this problem for your potential customers.
3. The checkout process is too long
Did you know that the average US checkout flow contains 23 form elements by default? Your name, address, and birthday are popular form fields that help online retailers understand their customers. But your quest for information could be causing them to exit altogether.
A long and complicated checkout process is the reason behind 18% of shopping cart abandonments. Luckily, this has an easy fix: ditch the unnecessary form fields in favor of checkout solutions like Shop Pay. It stores a customer’s information so they can simply tap to buy the items in their cart. No three-page walls of questions needed.
4. Pricing was unclear
High shipping costs are a leading cause of cart abandonment. In a similar vein, many (17%) of shoppers abandon their cart because they couldn’t calculate the total order cost up-front.
Customers can be subject to extra fees when buying online, especially when they’re purchasing from another country. Import taxes and currency conversions all play a role in determining whether it’s worth buying from an online retailer.
5. The website is untrustworthy
In 2020, almost 1.4 million people in the US reported being a victim of identity theft. With sensitive information like credit card numbers and home addresses being submitted through an online checkout, it’s no wonder why modern-day shoppers are concerned about their privacy when shopping online.
Some 17% of people abandon their online shopping carts because they didn’t trust the site with their credit card information. Installing an SSL certificate, highlighting customer testimonials, and showcasing warranties all help to combat this.
What are abandoned cart emails?
If you’ve ever left an online purchase behind, you may have received abandoned cart emails, which often come in stages. The 1st is usually a gentle reminder to complete your purchase. The 2nd might give you a deadline—“Your order is about to expire!”—and the 3rd usually includes a coupon or discount to bring you back. Small retailers often create and send these emails manually. If that’s too time consuming for your business, don’t worry—you can automate the process.
Using relevant data
To write an effective abandoned cart email, you need 2 key pieces of information:
- Why did the customer start to buy?
- Why did they walk away?
If you know the answers to these questions and can address them in your email copy, you’re halfway there. Some common reasons for walking away include high shipping costs, having to register for an account, or concerns about the site’s security.
But if you don’t have answers, start collecting feedback to determine exactly why your customers show up at your website and not your competitor’s—and why they walked away. Then you can solve the problem with an email that offers discounted shipping, helps them check out, or emphasizes your site’s safety.
How to write abandoned cart emails that convert
Clever copy and vivid imagery can engage your customers, but capturing their attention won’t matter unless you make it easy for them to buy the products they want. That’s why it’s crucial to communicate as clearly as possible.
1. Know your audience
Who are your customers, and what kind of relationship do they have with your business? What kind of relationship do they want? Will they respond well to jokes, or would they rather you just get to the point? Make sure you know the answers to these questions before you write your email. Better yet, write an email for each segment of your audience.
2. Write a compelling subject line
The subject is one of the first things your recipients will see. So how do you write copy that grabs their attention? Keep it short and sweet. You don’t want your subject to run off the screen or trail off with an ellipsis. If you’re targeting mobile users, keep it to 50 characters or fewer.
Use the customer’s name. For example, you could write, “Hey Tony, you left something here.” Whenever possible, keep things personal and friendly.
Don’t be spammy. This can be tricky, so let your team read each subject line. If anybody says something feels like clickbait, toss it. When in doubt, keep things clean and simple. That means not using more than 1 exclamation point or writing anything in all caps.
Use numbers. “Hey Martha, the 7 items in your cart are waiting for you.” This will make your email feel concrete and immediate.
3. List the items in the cart
By the time you send your email, your recipient may have forgotten what they were going to purchase. They may have even forgotten that they were thinking about buying anything from your site at all. That’s why it’s important to remind them what products they selected (and include pictures of them if you can).
4. Conclude the email with a call to action
You can’t expect your readers to know what to do unless you explicitly tell them, so be sure to include a link to your checkout page with clear instructions. You may even want to consider putting a call to action (CTA) at the top and bottom of the email.
How to tackle cart abandonment and regain lost sales
1. Use a trustworthy ecommerce platform
The journey to make up for lost ecommerce revenue does not begin on the checkout page. The overall user experience affects the likelihood that a customer will complete a purchase. That success is rooted in choosing a best-in-class ecommerce platform.
Make sure your ecommerce platform is responsive. The highest cart abandonment rates are for tablet and mobile users. If your load times are too long, or if your pages need to be compressed and understood to be comprehensible, this can degrade your mobile experience and increase your bounce rate. Choose a template that depends on the device being downloaded. Shopify’s theme library has over 70 responsive plug-and-play themes to choose from.
Finally, consider all applications that can reduce cart abandonment across an entire ecommerce site. For example, Keep Cart can be purchased from the Shopify app store. We remember products that customers have added to their online shopping cart. When you leave the site and come back later, the item is saved and ready to purchase.
2. Accept alternative payment options
Those days are gone when customers have to enter their long card number into their browser. Some 7% of people abandoned their shopping cart because the retailer didn’t offer enough payment methods. Amongst some of the most popular payment methods are:
- Shopping apps (Shop Pay and PayPal)
- Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay)
- Buy now, pay later (Shop Pay Installments, Klarna, Four, and AfterPay)
One in four merchants using Shop Pay Installments double their average order value when allowing customers to spread the cost over monthly payments. Customers can spread the cost of higher ticket items over a longer period.
Also, now you don’t need to overhaul your existing payment processing system. A plug-and-play app, like Shop App, means customers can use their preferred payment method and buy items in their cart in just one click.
3. Offer free (or discounted) delivery
Consider offering free delivery to customers and displaying it prominently in your checkout process. You could cover the cost of shipping for orders over a certain amount, or bake the average cost of shipping into your product’s retail price. Even if you can’t scrap shipping costs entirely, there are workarounds to offering cheaper delivery for people mid-checkout. You could:
- Use lightweight packing materials to reduce its weight
- Rely on Shopify Shipping
- Offer free local delivery or pickup
4. Highlight your returns policy
Returns policies aren’t just essential post-purchase. Around one in 10 cart abandonments happen because the shopper wasn’t satisfied with the returns policy during the checkout process.
Online retailers are plagued by returns. So, it doesn’t make sense to show return options before a customer has purchased it, right? Not necessarily. Shoppers want to know they have options for items they buy online like returning it for a full refund if it’s different from what they expected. Reduce shopping cart abandonment by showcasing your return policy mid-checkout.
5. Retarget cart abandoners elsewhere online
The beauty of online shopping is that most customers use several channels at once. Advertising slots on social media, email, and other websites are prime real estate for reducing cart abandonment. Not convinced? Research shows that retargeting can reduce cart abandonment by 6.5%, and increase online sales by almost 20%.
Facebook is one social platform that makes it easy to retarget shoppers who’ve left items in an online cart. The Pixel is installed on your site and collects data about the shopper including which items they’ve abandoned. That data is synced with a Facebook profile. Dynamic product ads show the exact items they’ve left, and nudge them to head back to your website to complete the purchase.
6. Optimize abandoned cart emails
Cart recovery emails are another way to recoup lost revenue. Similar to retargeting ads, they collect product information data like which items a customer has added to their cart, the size, and color to deliver an email reminder to complete the purchase.
This type of email marketing campaign has an open rate of 45% a stark improvement to the benchmark of 18.39% for general retail emails. One in five recipients of a cart abandonment email click it; 11% will purchase something as a result.
So, what makes a good cart recovery email? A reminder of the product they’ve left, along with extra incentives (like free shipping), can be enough to convince a shopper to continue with their purchase. When reminding people of the items they’ve left in their shopping cart, timing is key.
7. Offer one-click checkout
The success of your online store depends on the checkout experience. A positive experience will take shoppers to the purchase confirmation page in as few clicks as possible. A negative one will cause them to exit midway through. Earlier, we touched on the fact that 18% of cart abandonments happen because of a complicated checkout.
An average large-sized ecommerce business can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate though better checkout design. An estimated $260 billion worth of lost orders are recoverable solely through a better checkout flow and design.
One way to do this is to offer a seamless checkout process like one-click checkout. Not only is it essential for fast conversions (Shop Pay increases checkout speed by 4x), but one-click checkout has been proven to increase conversions by 35.62%.
Conclusion
These shopping cart abandonment statistics prove you’re leaving money on the table. People are already visiting your website. More than half of those who like a product enough to add it to their cart exit without buying because of complicated checkout processes, unclear pricing, and high shipping costs are huge factors in why a shopper decides to exit.
These cart abandonment statistics show some of the most common reasons why shoppers abandon and the specific areas brands need to focus on. Addressing these key points should help you reduce your cart abandonment rate and redirect a good portion of shoppers that don’t initially complete their purchase. So in the long run, you can create a better customer experience, boost conversions and build stronger brand loyalty.