An abandoned cart is an inescapable agent of downfall for eCommerce businesses. It is inevitable; every online store has to suffer from it. Long story short, an eCommerce abandoned cart is a fact where customers add products to the cart and leave without buying them. It is frustrating when you do everything (run paid ads, create sales funnels, and promise enticing offers) to get buyers’ attention, to lose them in the middle of a purchase. A high abandoned cart rate is one of the reasons for the loss of revenue, but it is a part of the business. You cannot completely vanish it, but you can lower the rates.

You can recover customers abandoning carts. To do so, reassess customer buying behaviour and find the root cause of why customers are not completing the payment process. For example, before finalizing a product, buyers explore different options and select the final product based on price, product quality, reviews, brand, and ease of shop. By addressing the root cause of your customers’ dissatisfaction, you can reduce both your potential losses in revenue as well as lower the customer churn rate.

There are some essential things that you might be doing wrong which lead to high abandoned carts.

 

Key Reasons For High Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

According to Baymard Institute, eCommerce’s average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%. Here are some critical reasons for the high shopping abandoned cart rate.

 

The Long Puzzling Checkout Process

The attention span of an online customer is less than a goldfish. Therefore, unnecessary steps in the checkout process will only worsen the customer experience. Hence, they likely will bounce back without completing the purchase. Thus, ensure your checkout process is smooth and easy for the customer to complete.

 

Unexpected Charges

This is a significant reason customers (with serious buying intent) refuse to shop. Baymard Institute study shows that 48% of customers abandon shopping carts because of extra costs like GST, shipping, charity fee, taxes, and other hidden fees.

It is head-scratching for customers when they see the cost as more than the actual cost of a product. These are all situations where customers who have serious buying intent will not make a purchase.

 

Security Concern

New customers resist shopping because they are uncomfortable disclosing their number or credit card information to a payment gateway they do not trust. Although the payment process is daunting for customers, giving card information to an unknown gateway raises concerns over data breaches and misuse of information.

Lack of social proof, unfamiliar payment system, outdated interface, and no SSL– raises a customer security concern.

 

Calculating the shopping abandoned cart rate is the total number of transactions executed divided by the total number of initiated sales (add to cart). Then minus one and multiply by a hundred. You’ll find your abandoned cart rate.

Here are some tried and tested methods to reduce the eCommerce cart abandonment rate:

 

Offer Multiple And Secured Payment Methods

Offer a mix of payment gateways your audience is familiar with and trusts. For example, some people use UPI, some pay through direct bank transfer, and some make the payment via credit card and Paytm. Know your customer’s payment preferences to establish trust in your business.

 

Simplify Checkout Process

A classic checkout process is like: shopping cart > billing details > shipping information and method > order summary > payment > confirmation. The checkout process should be 3 or 5 steps long. The shorter, the better. Only ask for information that is necessary to carry out the payment. Try to provide (if it is suitable for your business) a one-click payment option or a single-page checkout process.

 

Do Not Shock By Hidden Charges

Unexpected costs are always annoying to customers, people want to know where they are spending their money, and unnecessary charges are not what they want to pay for. Therefore, do not mislead customers with hidden charges; unfold all taxes, shipping, and handling charges, ideally on the product page or payment summary.

 

Email Retargeting

Email retargeting is the perfect way to win customers back after they abandon the cart. According to Rejoiner’s study, 16% of customers will convert back to a cart if you send a retargeting email within one hour of cart abandonment. Run A/B testing with different email retargeting campaigns and analyze which works best to bring customers back.

 

Improve Page Speed

Slow page loading speed and uptime are an annoyance to customers. Website speed is proportional to the conversion rate. As a result, customers wait less than three seconds for a page to load before they abandon the site. Many reasons are slow loading speed: unoptimized pages, artefacts, bad hosting providers, and much more.

 

Provide Guest Checkout Option

Guest checkout means customers need not put their credit card information, email, and phone number details to pay for their purchase.

New shoppers often do not want to create an account for a one-time purchase. For them, it is time-consuming and revealing information they may not like. Let customers skip creating an account if they want to, which will cut additional short steps requiring information they are hesitant to give.

 

 

Include Progress Indicator Bar

Progress bars show customers their progress toward completing the transaction. It is a great UI to include on the checkout page to provide the customer’s status in completing a purchase. As the customer moves forward in the progress bar, it creates a sense of accomplishment with their purchase. It keeps customers engaged and reduces cart abandonment.

 

Include A Call To Action

A clear call to action button is crucial to tell customers what to expect in the next step. For example, after the add-to-cart button, the next CTA should be the “Buy Now” button leading to the “Confirm and Pay now” call to action button. Conversely, an Unclear CTA means customers do not know what to do next, leading to abandoning the payment process.

 

Add Social Proofs

A prospect’s buying decisions are highly influenced by the opinion of other buyers’ experience with the product. Social proofs in the form of reviews, ratings, and customer photos build trust for the product with the customers. Adding trust signals like these social proofs on the product page, emails, and social media will make customers believe that your product is genuine and people are getting positive results from it.

 

Offer Live Customer Support

Customers might have some complaints or hiccups during the checkout process and expect to be guided promptly. Live customer support helps buyers to resolve issues then and there.

 

 

Conclusion

The abandoned cart rate is a crucial KPI eCommerce business to be measured. You can lower the cart abandonment rate; however, you cannot achieve a 0% rate as there will always be potential customers who will leave without purchasing the product (for other reasons).

The average cart abandonment rate is 71%, but by optimizing the checkout process and with all of the above methods, you can reduce it (the best cart abandonment rate is around 20%) to a very extent.