How to Avoid Cart Abandonment

Have you ever wondered why some websites seem to attract lots of visitors but don’t generate as many sales?

One of the biggest reasons is “online shopping cart abandonment” – and the true extent of the problem might surprise you. We offer some solutions to cut down your cart abandonment rate, and a couple of different strategies to bring potential customers back to your online store.

What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Cart abandonment happens when a visitor adds products to their cart or basket on an e-commerce website but doesn’t complete their purchase. It’s a major challenge for eCommerce sites because it reduces sales and increases costs.

Here’s a sobering statistic for you – according to eCommerce experts at the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is a staggering 69.82% – calculated from 46 different studies between 2012 and 2021. This means for every 100 visitors who start shopping on a website, only 30 ever complete their purchase, and 70 potential buyers walk away before they reach checkout.

It can be worse depending on your industry sector. Travel is one of the most abandoned sectors of eCommerce. On average, holiday-makers have an astounding shopping cart abandonment rate of almost 85%, and this rises during weekends, holidays, and especially on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Purchase completion rates on desktops/tablets hover around 13%, while mobile completion rates stand at 8.5%.

We have clients that ask us about this all the time. “Why do people add products to their basket if they’re not going to buy it?” Understanding what’s causing shoppers to leave their purchases behind and being proactive about improving those areas will help protect your conversion rate.

Reasons for Cart Abandonment

The truth is, we all do it. All the time. Think about it, how often do you look online at a shop, click around a bit, and then for whatever reason, leave before you make a purchase?

The biggest reasons are simply natural consequences of how visitors browse websites and buying habits  – many users will be doing window shopping, price comparison, saving items for later, exploring gift options, etc. These are largely unavoidable cart and checkout abandonments – 58.6% of American online shoppers have abandoned a cart within the last 3 months (source) because “I was just browsing / not ready to buy”.

But that still leaves nearly half of potential buyers becoming cart abandoners. You might not be able to prevent all cart abandonment, but you can be proactive about cart optimisation once you understand the most common reasons…

Additional costs, unexpected shipping costs or hidden tax

The number one offending reason customers abandon their shopping cart is because of hidden costs they didn’t notice before applying for the payment method.

Sometimes businesses do this because they’re afraid of losing sales if they reveal pricing information, or it might be that they think it will be too confusing for shoppers. However, hiding this information can make customers feel like they were cheated and manipulated by the sellers. It’s hard to win back a customer once they’ve lost trust in your site, so try not to lose any of them.

A simple fix is to be transparent about costs – showing delivery and other fees on product pages, as shoppers are making purchasing decisions, or offering a price calculator at the beginning of checkout. Customers will see all the costs upfront and won’t feel cheated by hidden fees, and they’ll trust you more.

Forcing the user to create an account

There are many reasons why a website needs to collect information about its users in order to provide a better service. You may need to track your customers’ behaviour and preferences in order to personalise your offers or store sensitive information about your customers. Finally, you may also want to gather feedback from your customers.

But users are wary of websites that force them to fill out endless forms and questionnaires and a complicated checkout process will only put your customers off.

Add a “Guest Checkout Option” and try to keep it short – 4 fields or less if at all possible. Only ask for the most important information like name, shipping address, card number and email address. Sometimes it’s even possible to add an option at the end to create an account after the purchase – offer incentives such as order tracking to persuade people to take the final step.

Lack of trust in your website

With personal information like credit cards and home addresses being submitted through an online checkout system, it’s no wonder that shoppers are concerned about their security when shopping online.

Consumers will leave a website if there is not an SSL certificate installed. Starting in 2018 if a website’s URL starts with HTTP and not HTTPS, Google Chrome web browsers explicitly warn users that that website was unsafe, and other browsers have followed suit. When you install an SSL certificate, you’re encrypting the connection between your web browser and your server, making sure that any sensitive information like passwords and credit cards remain private.

Offering a good return policy also gives shoppers peace of mind. They won’t feel like they’re getting scammed if something doesn’t work out. You’ll want to link to the return policy as soon as possible during the checkout process. This way, shoppers will have no reason to wander off to another site.

Social proof is another tactic you can use to help build trust in your website – providing verified reviews from other customers, for example through star ratings, reviews or testimonials from other happy customers and reviews of specific products to help communicate the value of your products.

We have more about the importance of Social Proof here.

Confusing Checkout Process and CTAs

Shoppers often find themselves confused about where to go once they’ve added something to their cart. They might not know how to proceed, or what happens next. There’s no point in running an eCommerce website if it’s not clear to users how they complete their purchases. A customer will always abandon their cart if they can’t even find the checkout!

Show clear calls to action (CTAs) – make sure that visitors understand what they’ll see next, and what they need to do. Confirm when products have been added to the cart, and offer the next steps for the shopper. The option to head straight to checkout is a useful shortcut too, with easy and seamless navigation between cart and checkout.

When shoppers arrive at the final step, make sure it’s obvious where to go, a big shiny button that says “Checkout Now!” is hard to ignore. Follow this up with clear calls to action on the checkout pages.

Lack of Progress Indicators on the checkout page

While it’s best to have as short a checkout experience as possible, sometimes you need to split this process into a few different steps. But after loading the third page of the entire checkout process, customers can become impatient, and wonder how many more forms they are going to have to fill out before the order is complete, and, you’ve guessed it, abandon the shopping cart.

Progress bars help customers understand where they are in a transaction, to see exactly how far along they are toward completing their purchase and give them confidence that everything is proceeding smoothly. A near-completed progress indicator can also serve as a motivation to continue and complete the purchase if they’ve seen how far they’ve already invested in the checkout.

Lack of payment options

Offering a single payment option or too few options can put unnecessary barriers between you and your shoppers’ Online shoppers prefer to use payment methods that are familiar and convenient for them, even if they’re not the cheapest.

Offering support for your most popular payment methods, especially the ones used most often by your target audience, ensures you’re not turning away potential customers. For some shoppers, your inability to support the preferred payment method might be grounds for them to leave your site entirely.

If you’re selling products with particularly high average order values, you might consider offering payment plans and buy now, pay later options from companies like Klarna and PayPal.

Retrieve lost sales with cart abandonment email campaigns and remarketing

Now let’s talk about recovering abandoned carts. Even with optimisation, abandoned carts will still happen, but are not always lost forever. There are a number of strategies to get them back to your site to complete their orders, and can even tap into the estimated 58.6% “just browsing” potential customers. Here are two we recommend…

Personalised follow-up emails

When an online shopper abandons their shopping cart, send them an automatic cart recovery email within 30 minutes of their last action, and again with a second email at 24 and 48 hours later.

These emails remind shoppers they haven’t completed a purchase, items they had previously looked at and offer them the opportunity to complete their purchase with a link back to your website that lets them pick up where they left off.

Consider including a coupon code too – the promise of a discount is usually enough to entice them to return. You can utilise automated systems that add promo codes to your emails. You can then target those emails to specific customers or groups of customers. This will help you increase sales and reduce customer service costs.

Retargeting ads

Retargeting ad campaigns are a great way to increase your conversion rate by reminding your website visitors what they’ve seen on your website while browsing the rest of the web. And unlike the above strategy – you don’t already need to know their email address to reach them.

You can segment the retargeting audience into cart abandoners, those who have returned after purchase or just visited the site. These segments allow you to send different kinds of ads to each group – for example, if someone left the cart before completing checkout, you could show them an offer for a discount code, or if you offer services, you might show them an ad for a free trial.

Retargeting works especially well with people who have abandoned carts because based on their behaviour they have shown enough interest to add your products to their cart, making them much more likely to convert into a sale than someone who was only browsing your website.

We cover retargeting in further depth here…