11 Proven Tips to Reduce Cart Abandonment You Should Not Miss

The digital world has improved the human shopping experience these days. So do their expectations! 

Consumers demand and expect more from brands to offer things not only to resolve their problems but also a seamless and satisfying experience during the shopping process. 

Thanks to the Internet’s power, customers can open the door to the eCommerce world with a wide range of sellers. This brings back several sales opportunities as well as a considerable problem to online retailers – Shopping Cart Abandonment. 

This post will take you through the top 11 proven tips that you can use to reduce cart abandonment. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Why should you care about Cart Abandonment Rate?

Though the presence of cart abandonment is annoying, modern businesses must face the truth: Cart abandonment is on the rise. 

As you can see on the latest figures reflecting the shopping cart abandonment rate by industry: 

Source: Statista

We all know cart abandonment is the case when customers leave a shopping site without making any purchase. Basically, they do add the store’s items to their cart but decide to abandon them for some reason.

No business wants this to happen because of its negative impact, including:

• Incorrect product availability: Directly reduces inventory levels: Make those products unavailable for genuine shoppers. This occurs if the number of abandoned items (which are unsolved) increase to a certain level 

• Cause the reduction in conversion rates and the business’s turnover: Loss both potential shoppers (who already add your products into their carts) and future shoppers (who can make purchases since the product availability)

Yet, shoppers abandon their carts due to specific reasons. Luckily, most of these can be avoidable by implementing the right strategies.

Why does cart abandonment happen?

Before breaking down into details of each tactic for reducing cart abandonment, let’s start out with the root of this problem. 

By identifying why cart abandonment happens, you can actively modify and apply appropriate solutions to gain back the lost sales as well as increase the store’s conversions. 

According to a report of SaleCycle:

• 55% of consumers abandon their carts due to high extra costs

• 34% of shoppers change their shopping decisions since they don’t want to create an account for making a purchase

• A long or complicated checkout process causes 26% of shoppers (with purchasing intention) to abandon their carts

• The hidden cost is the 4th factor that leads to cart abandonment, with 21%

• Other reasons: the feeling of untrustworthy site, web errors, slow delivery, returns policy, and limited payment options. 

11 best tips to reduce cart abandonment 

Ensure no hidden cost

This is actually a massive issue that many e-retailers overlook since they underestimate the impact of hidden costs on customers’ purchase decisions. 

This is how you can do: 

• Consider combining the shopping fee with the product price right on the product page. Then announce shoppers about this combination while they’re shopping

• Don’t sneak shipping costs in toward the end of a transaction. Instead, if possible, disclosure all extra fees, especially shipping costs (for each delivery service) on the product page

Source: Amazon

Since the shipping fee or other extra costs are not displayed with the price tag, customers only discover these fees when moving to the last step of the checkout process. Especially, shipping cost is one of which hated the most by customers.

So much so that it became the biggest reason for cart abandonment. Not only do shoppers feel surprised with the extra charges but they can also stop the purchase. 

Allow checkout without registration 

It comes as no surprise when an eCommerce site requests potential customers to create an account before purchasing. 

This comes with certain benefits for businesses like collecting more data from the buyers, better organizing buyer’s info, and a launchpad for building long-lasting relationships with customers. 

However, the practical result proves this action no more than a negative factor since it only leads to a high bounce rate and cart abandonment. 

In fact, customers are impatient with the complex registration process. You can try to eliminate this unnecessary annoyance by:

• Request customers to sign up for an account after they complete their orders

• Set the “Sign in” request to be optional on the checkout page. In other words, shoppers can pass through the registration step to make payment

Provide multiple payment options

Another reason for high cart abandonment rates can be the lack of payment options. This relates directly to user experience since customers will want to pick their favorite payment methods than something new to them or rarely use.

If you’re in this case, try to offer more payment options, apart from popular methods like PayPal, MasterCard, or American Express, or Visa. 

Furthermore, you can implement this tactic even more effectively by conducting research on your target market about ideal payment options.

Create the sense of scarcity and urgency

There are tons of reasons that cause a customer’s hesitation when shopping online. Once the uncertain feeling lasts long enough, the initial excitement of buyers disappears, leading to cart abandonment. 

One way to deal with this uncertainty of customers is to trigger the fear of missing out that compels them to click on that buy button instantly. 

Urgency and scarcity are parts of a time-based strategy. The sense of urgency grows the fear of missing out on great deals, while the scarcity generates sales using the “social proof” effect. 

• Use motivating phrases like “Today Only” or “Once-In-A-Lifetime offer” “Limited time only” on the homepage for special promotions or featured items

• Use countdown timers with an end time for promos in suitable frequency that don’t make customers think it’s fake

• Run low on quantities using words like “Only X left” (typically under 10 items) or “limited quantities” 

Improve the customer responsiveness

Exceptional customer service is the key to eCommerce growth and success. The buyer’s journey is complicated. And it even becomes more unpredictable in the digital world due to the influence of multiple factors during the shopping process.

That’s why to close a sale, the role of a store’s customer service is essential in fulfilling customers’ shopping experience, hence reducing cart abandonment rates. 

Source: Boodles

Ensure you’re always on the line whenever customers need it. Actually, there are several channels you can support shoppers when required quickly, such as: 

• Phone number

• The business’s email address

• Live chat (a must for an eCommerce site)

• The store’s official social channels like Instagram or Facebook

All of the contact information should be provided precisely on the official website (generally on the site’s footer or Contact Us page). Make sure visitors can find them easily. 

Moreover, connecting your site to an AI chatbot software might be a great idea to offer support and instant responses 24/7.

Empower customers’ trust with social proof

People want to be in a group. It’s not just a coincidence when we find reviews of a product before purchasing or choose the restaurant with customers in it. This phenomenon is called “social proof” under the aspect of modern psychology. 

And it has been used quite a lot in marketing in order to make customers more confident when making a purchase. In other words, one reason for customers to abandon their carts is the lack of trust. 

Source: Mageplaza

And social proof reinforces that trust and convinces shoppers you’re the right choice for them. There are a ton of different ways online merchants can put social proof in action, for instance:

• Try to get positive reviews on all the popular review sites in your industry 

• Display the review section on your website (product pages, the home page, or landing pages)

• Gaining more feedbacks on your site by sending review reminder to customers after purchase 

• Consider teaming up or collaborating with influencers in your niche

• Point out popular brands using your products or service. And add their logos on the homepage or focus on driving the following numbers on the brand’s social channels

• Showcase the number of customers or subscribers who have reached you for solutions and got the value

Apart from above tactics, one best tactic for applying social proof you shouldn’t overlook is review optimization. 

Amazon’s optimized review section

In fact, there are various ways to optimize the review’s effectiveness on your site. The most effective one is to connect your online store with a review extension that allows your customers to have a better user experience on your site’s review section.

For those who’re growing their online business on Magento 2, a product reviews extension will be an excellent choice to help you harness the social proof’s power on your site. A great tool to give shoppers a better experience and gain more valuable feedback for future improvements. 

Retarget customers with cart abandonment emails

Suppose customer retention is much more important and cost-valuable than customer acquisition. Then retargeting is the marketing effort of businesses to gain back those potential customers who have left your site without making any purchase.

Thus, remarketing is one of the most popular tactics used by today’s businesses to reduce cart abandonment rates. 3 major ways to retarget: 

• Retargeting with advertising: Work well with Google and social media platforms (mostly on Facebook and Instagram)  

• Retargeting with cart abandonment emails: Take advantage of your cart abandoners’ info and launch series of follow-up emails focusing on enticing customers to complete their purchases using cart abandonment email app

• SMS remarketing: Use texts to reach customers as well as remind them to purchase goods left behind or previously saved on their carts

Simplify the checkout process

During the online checkout process, even the slightest details can affect the user experience. Just a small inconvenience can be enough to abandon a purchase. 

Furthermore, the online consumer is impatient and usually wary of giving too much personal information. Therefore, simplifying this process for a smooth transaction can better improve your cart abandonment rate significantly. 

A well-designed checkout process should be able to reduce unnecessary friction for shoppers in many ways, for instance:

• Focus on improving the checkout experience on both desktop and mobile devices

• Allow shoppers to remove or add products from the shopping cart effortlessly. Consider applying the Ajax technology to dynamically load the cart without having to refresh the whole page (faster loading time) 

• Shorten the checkout process by applying the One Step Checkout model. If not, just limit to 3 to 4 checkout steps and support shoppers with a visual progress indicator and a description of each step

• Perform an A/B test of multiple checkout templates to get one that’s most effective 

• Avoid having unnecessary design elements on the checkout page that may cause unwanted distractions. Your checkout page should only include 3 main sections: delivery details, payment details, and order summary

Leverage the power of buttons

Actually, online merchants can direct a customer’s buying journey on their site using a logical button system based on shopping habits. 

The role of those buttons is to deliver customers a more convenient shopping experience, for instance. One mostly used tactic is to add the “Save for Later” button or “Add to Wishlist” button on the product page or category page. 

Source: Sigma Beauty 

This way, merchants enable shoppers to add products to their carts and save them for later. Shoppers who are about to abandon their carts are more likely to click on that button for “considering” products. What’s more, don’t overuse buttons on your sites and try to keep them simple.

Check your SEO performance on-page

Cart abandonment is unavoidable. However, most cases’ main reasons start from “unpleasant user experience” for instant slow load speed or crashed pages, unloaded images, etc.

All these factors cause an unprofessional impression on the shoppers’ minds, making them not confident to buy products from that site, hence abandoning their carts.

Here are some site elements that can offer a more seamless experience for your customers:

• Make sure all the elements of your website perform its best and are convenient for online shoppers on mobile devices

• Optimize the web content, especially the content on product pages. Make your product descriptions more attractive with real high-quality product pictures or short videos

• Use different on-page tactics to optimize the page load times, for example, reduce the sizes of displayed images or limit the use of ad network trackers. Use PageSpeed Insights to check your speed

This works in reducing cart abandonment rates and driving up your sales.

Display a clear return policy on the website

For online shoppers, making a purchase is a risk since they don’t have the opportunity to re-experience them in hand and all their trust comes from previous customers’ reviews.

Therefore, a bulletproof money-back guarantee or other assurances is the perfect way to overcome the customers’ uncertainty and fear of losing money. You should:

• Let shoppers know that you have a return policy by putting it front-and-center placements on the checkout page

• Consider using an attached link to navigate shoppers to a separate page for the brand’s return policy 

• Don’t hide it in the depths of the terms and conditions page

The bottom line!

The eCommerce industry has developed at a crazy rapid pace, opening countless sales opportunities for modern businesses in the digital age. At the same time, cart abandonment for sure becomes a headache for any e-retailer.

It’s no more than a thief that’s stealing revenue and stunting your business growth. Though cart abandonment has been (and always will be) a part of eCommerce, it doesn’t mean that you can’t mitigate its effects. 

Hope the above tips help you better deal with cart abandoners and get closer to your business’s goals day by day. Thanks for reading!