Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why Businesses Are Losing Sales

August 5, 2021

Share This Post

The odds are that you’re losing out on sales without even knowing it because of cart abandonment. This costs eCommerce brands billions of dollars, and it likely costs your brand thousands.

The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your cart abandonment rates and boost your conversion rates.

What Is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Shopping cart abandonment refers to when online shoppers “abandon” their online shopping cart before making a purchase on a website. They go through the trouble of browsing your website and selecting the perfect items — only to not end up buying them. This issue can be extremely frustrating and problematic for eCommerce business owners.

Why Should You Care About Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Clearly, shopping cart abandonment is annoying, but it’s so much more than that in reality. Here are some reasons why you need to care about shopping cart abandonment and take action to address this issue:

The average shopping cart abandonment rate across all industries is around 70%
However, mobile users abandon their carts at even higher rates — around 85%
As a result, eCommerce companies are losing out on more than $18 billion in sales revenue each year due to shopping cart abandonment

Why Do Customers Abandon Their Carts?

A customer could abandon their cart for a whole host of different reasons. Understand your customers better by learning why they’re abandoning their carts on your ecommerce sites. You can find this information in Google Analytics by looking at. your types of visitors, their behavior, which ad they click on to enter your site, etc.

1. Costs

One of the biggest reasons why customers abandon their carts relates to cost. Sometimes customers get to the very end of the checkout process only to see the total amount and decide that it’s just too expensive. Things like taxes, shipping fees, and processing fees add up quickly and can easily turn off a customer.

Other times, customers add multiple items to their cart without seeing the total, and once they do, it’s more than they expected. As a result, customers may choose to look elsewhere for better prices or may decide to purchase these items in-store to eliminate some of these added costs.

2. Shipping

Another reason why customers abandon their carts relates to shipping. Perhaps a customer doesn’t want to be charged for shipping fees. Or perhaps a customer isn’t impressed by your delivery timeframes. It can be difficult for smaller and newer online businesses to compete with the prices and speed offered by online giants like Amazon.

Thanks to the omnipotence of these companies, people have come to expect free shipping with their online orders. And while you may not be able to offer such favorable terms, you should still try to minimize shipping costs and expedite the process as much as you possibly can.

3. Process

In other cases, customers abandon their carts simply due to the checkout process. Some websites have a very involved and complicated checkout process with multiple different steps.

However, this is just turning customers away. Instead, you need to make the process as straightforward as possible.

4. Trust

Customers are unlikely to purchase from companies that they don’t trust. This is another reason why customers may abandon their carts when shopping online. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of scam companies out there trying to take advantage of consumers by stealing their information and identity.

As a result, customers may be hesitant to buy from you if they aren’t aware of your reputation or have a negative reputation regarding security and legitimacy.

5. Technology

The final reason why customers abandon their carts relates to technology. Sometimes, technology simply doesn’t work, and it could be driving customers away. This is because customers draw a strong connection between technology and trust. If your technology doesn’t even work properly, customers are unlikely to feel confident giving you their business and personal information.

How to Address Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment can be incredibly problematic for online businesses. The good news is that you can do things to address shopping cart abandonment and boost your sales in the process.

1. Include a Guest Checkout Option

The first thing you can do to address shopping cart abandonment is to include a guest checkout option. Often, customers don’t want to go through the hassle of creating an account with a password to make a purchase.

Essentially, this is a barrier to purchase that you need to break down. Including a guest checkout option makes the process quick and easy for customers — increasing the likelihood of completing the checkout process.

2. Improve the Checkout Process

Additional steps may be necessary to improve the overall checkout process and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. Generally speaking, you want your checkout process to have as a few steps and fields as possible. Only require the most vital information to purchase, for instance, name, address, email address, and credit card information. You may also want to include several different types of payment methods.

It’s also helpful to put all of this on a single page rather than having multiple different pages for shipping, billing, confirmation, etc.

3. Fix Technical Issues

Once you have optimized the checkout process, you need to take additional steps to optimize your website in general. As you now know, technical issues can lead to shopping cart abandonment.

For this reason, your site needs to consistently be in tip-top shape to get customers through the checkout process. You can do this by investing in coding, IT, and A/B testing for your website to ensure that it functions quickly and properly at all times.

4. Establish Trust

Another thing that you can do to address shopping cart abandonment is to establish trust. There are a few different ways that you can do this. First, you can do this through brand awareness marketing campaigns. By getting your name out there, people will be more likely to trust you.

Second, you can include social proof. Feature legitimate customer reviews on your website to show that you are a trustworthy company. Finally, place a trust seal on your website to show that you’re dedicated to protecting customer information with a secure website.

5. Cart Abandonment Emails or SMS

You’re always going to be dealing with abandoned carts no matter what you do. The good news is that there are things you can do to address this issue after the fact.

Specifically, abandoned cart recovery tactics allow you to reach out to customers who have previously abandoned their carts in your ecommerce store. Popular methods include using a cart recovery email and SMS text to mobile devices to directly reach these individuals, remind them about their items, and offer an incentive after their completed purchase. Incentives can be coupons or a coupon code, discounts, and more.

6. Abandoned Cart Retargeting

Another way that you can reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts is to retarget them with marketing materials. Pixels allow you to track who visits your website.

From there, you can use that data to present them with “reminder” advertisements about the items on their checkout page on relevant online platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.