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Helpful Hints to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping Cart Abandonment is when someone puts something into their ‘digital’ shopping cart but then doesn’t complete the checkout process. It is the source of huge amounts of frustration (as well as more than a few grey hairs) for eCommerce business owners, because they were literally so close to making a sale – but then it slipped out of their fingers.

Some stats relating to stuff people didn’t buy:

  • The average shopping cart abandonment rate is 65.23%
  • Average online conversion rate is 2.13%
  • Abandonment is lowest around Christmas & other sales periods such Black Friday & EOFY
  • The travel industry has one of the highest cart abandonment rates, sitting at aroung 80%

How Do I Know What My Cart Abandonment Rate Is?

This totally depends on what methods you have in place to track your website’s traffics and conversions, however the most widely used (and arguably the easiest because it is FREE) is to set up conversion tracking and event tracking in Google Analytics.

With Google Analytics, you can track the different actions that people take while they are browsing on your website and assign a value to them. Obviously a sale is the ultimate conversion, but you can have ‘mini’ conversions, like a newsletter signup, downloading a whitepaper or adding a product to their shopping cart.

So in this scenario, your cart abandonment rate is the amount of people who have put something into their shopping cart minus the amount of people who went on to purchase that product.

Cart Abandonment RateWhy do people go to the effort of putting stuff in their shopping carts if they aren’t going to then purchase it?

  • 44% high shipping costs
  • 41% not ready to purchase
  • 25% high product price
  • 24% couldn’t find preferred payment option

Hmmm… 44 + 41 + 25 + 24 =…. More than 100%, that’s for sure! I guess that’s proof you can’t believe every infographic you see on the internet! Regardless of the percentages they are legitimate reasons for people abandoning those fluffy oversized bunny rabbit slippers before they even get select their payment method, and I’ve listed some ways that you can reduce these issues below.

How Can I Reduce My Cart Abandonment Rate?

High Shipping Costs:

If you’ve got tracking software like Google Analytics installed on your website then you should be able to see where and when the drop off happens, and for a lot of businesses, it happens the moment the customer finds out how much shipping is going to cost. The fact of the matter is that often a novelty pair of slippers just isn’t worth the extra $12.50 the customer has to pay in shipping.

In these cases, I would suggest launching a remarketing campaign. This is where you ‘stalk’ the customer, showing them pictures of your fluffy bunny slippers everywhere they go on the internet until they cave in and buy the item. As remarketing campaigns are highly targeted and can be set to display only to people that got to a certain stage in the buying process, you could also include a sneaky little coupon code that waives or reduces the cost of shipping to entice them back.

You never know, they might even throw in a second pair of matching slippers for the S.O to maximise their saving potential from the coupon!

Not Ready to Purchase

This abandoned cart reason is a bit trickier to tackle because you don’t know where they are up to in the decision-making process – they might have just been starting to research their options, or maybe they are waiting to finalise the purchase until they have been paid, or they may have decided that they can’t purchase big floppy bunny slippers without having a matching pair of PJs, so they’ve gone to make sure that they can buy the jammies before they commit to the slippers.

My advice for this abandon cart strategy would again be a remarketing campaign, but where as the messaging in the campaign above would revolve around giving the customer additional incentive to come back, the message for this campaign would be more of a ‘reminder’ that they haven’t finalised their purchase. This way they’ll remember to come back once they’ve been paid or found the other elements of their sleep-time outfit.

High Product Price

In this example I am going to go ahead and assume that your product is priced competitively and that customers cannot locate a product that is of similar quality for a better price. If this is not the case well then… the solution is fairly obvious I think.

For everyone else – have you considered a ‘welcome’ campaign for first-time buyers where you offer them a considerable price reduction on their first purchase? The reasoning behind this is that it eases some of their discomfort regarding the price and enables you to ‘wow’ them with your dazzling customer service, super-quick couriers and high-quality products. If you achieve said dazzling of the customer then you’ll find that:

  1. Customer will be more likely to become a repeat purchaser; they know your products are high quality and they trust you to deliver so they no longer mind (as much) about the high price tag.
  2. They’ll gush to all of their closest friends about the wonderful shopping experience they had on your website and how soft your bunny slip-slips are, and then all of their friends will become jealous and come purchase their own novelty footwear from your website.

Couldn’t Find Preferred Payment Option

This one is simple really – users need to be comfortable and trust that you’re a legitimate company and that their money is going to travel safely across the interwebs with no threat of fraudulent activity. Therefore, where possible, use big brand name payment gateways that have brand recognition, like PayPal, Secure Pay or After Pay.

Having more than one option is a benefit, as is simplifying the payment process as much as possible, so that they user can give you their money quickly and easily.

The End

Well, there you have it. Four simple ways to reduce cart abandonment. If setting all of this up sounds a bit out of your league, or you just don’t have enough time to get it sorted, then the fluffy-bunny-slipper-wearing team at PN Digital, who NEVER abandon carts (promise!) are more than happy to help you out. Give us a call.

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