Research by Statista indicates that the cart abandonment rate accounts for more than 88% worldwide in March 2020 for online shopping. An abandoned cart means that a customer relationship is worth pursuing.
Many customers leave their carts behind for a variety of reasons, whether in-store or online shopping. While some cart abandonment triggers are inevitable, like an emergency phone call, the abandonment rate would affect the checkout process consequently.
As a store owner on the Shopify platform, you might always find ways to reduce the cart abandonment rate effectively. So you come to the right place. Here we’ve compiled ten incredible tactics to keep online customers engaged, lower the shopping cart abandonment rate, and make customers turn back to your stores.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment refers to when your shoppers add products to their cart but leave your store without making a purchase. This rate is often measured in the percentage of carts abandoned over a specific period of time. It can be affected by bad UI, confusing pricing, checkout flow, and brand trustworthiness.
Some Statistics on Cart Abandonment
A study from the Baymard Institute concludes that customers abandon their shopping carts because one of these following reasons:
● Expensive shipping fee (55%)
● Long or complex checkout process (26%)
● Couldn’t trust the website with credit card information (17%)
● Site requiring customers to sign up for an account (34%)
● The website has errors (17%)
● Too few payment options (6%)
Besides, other reasons for cart abandonment are:
● Having a slow site: A slow site can raise the abandonment rate by 75% and loyalty by 50%.
● Customers just browsing: The majority of customers are just visiting e-commerce stores as they are doing online research as to the most appealing deals.
10 Hands-on Practices to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment
Enhance the customer experience
Every little detail on the website can make visitors stay or leave.
Shopify claimed that 39% of consumers didn’t finish a purchase as the website timed out or crashed. Therefore, it is essential to create a better website experience for shoppers. Here are a few ways that can be useful:
● Apply a mobile-friendly website theme: Allow customers to visit your website from any device. There were about 79% of smartphone users making a purchase on their mobile phones, according to a survey in 2019.
● Boost your site loading speed: A slow website can disappoint customers, impact your ranking on search engines, and potential massive sales losses. You can think about using GTMetrix to measure your site’s loading speed and learn how to improve it.
● Utilize flattering product images: Appealing product images can captivate your customers’ attention. Plus, utilizing professional product images can gain customer trust and encourage them to make their decision faster.
Generate an exit-intent strategy
Online customers are constantly searching for the best items and deals. Some people add an item to their cart, then realize they want to research more. That’s the reason why you should create an exit-intent strategy.
An exit strategy refers to offering a piece of value to customers when they tend to leave your Shopify store. We often call them exit-intent popups. These popups can provide:
● Discounts
● Free shipping offers
● Downloadable content
● Contests or chances to win with prizes
Figure out what consumers are looking at and how you can make them stay. You don’t have to show an exit-intent popup on each page of your store site, but consider including it to:
● Category pages
● Product pages
● Checkout pages
Run a promotion
Statista research shows that 8% of shoppers leave their cart behind if they cannot find a coupon or discount code. The same report also indicates that 46% of online customers abandon their carts if the code doesn’t work or expire.
These findings also reveal that some customers are die-hard deal-seekers who always want to look for the best deals before they make a purchase decision. And if they can’t find anything appealing in your store, they will go to another website.
Loyalty offers, discounts, and bulk-buy pricing are popular business practices that help brands enhance customer loyalty and raise their lifetime value.
Once a customer leaves your website, the possibility of getting them back is significantly decreased. So it is important to make hay while the sun shines. Let’s show appealing discounts on popups, sidebars, and website banners.
Provide a clear return policy
According to Return Cloud, 66% of customers approve that they are willing to pay money if the return policy is good.
That’s entirely true. Online consumers can’t touch the products with their hands, and nobody wants to purchase something that doesn’t look good in real-life.
If you don’t provide free returns, you can run a test to determine whether it’s something you want to do. Below are our suggestions:
● For 30 days, you provide free returns on all products. When the trial is over, compare the sales created in those 30 days with sales made before.
● Then deduct the cost of returns from an increased amount of sales to confirm whether a flexible return policy works for your bottom line.
For example, TopShop once offered its UK consumers. Its product pages showcase a “Free UK returns” banner so shoppers can make a safe purchase.
Offer attentive customer support
Bad customer support is another reason leading to shopping carts being abandoned. It’s possible that customers couldn’t finish the order as there was a technical problem. Or maybe they had questions or doubts about the product, shipping, or refunds.
Let shoppers know that your brand is available when they need you most. Just bear in mind that different shoppers prefer interacting with businesses via various channels. Thus, it would be best if you offered a couple of ways for them to contact you easily.
Some of the most widely used communication channels among online customers include:
● Live chat
● Social media direct messages
● Social media comments
● Phone
● FAQ page
Send abandoned cart emails
If a shopper has subscribed and registered an account on your e-commerce store, you can probably access them through email.
You can choose email automation services such as Shopify Abandoned Cart Recovery app to send cart abandonment emails to shoppers who haven’t completed their orders. Remarkably, this application also lets you monitor shopping carts in real-time with various statuses, including shopping, abandoned, recovered, and converted. Moreover, its abandonment analysis helps store owners know which input field in the checkout process is most left blank by customers. Thereby, the owners can improve their checkout experience better.
Using an abandoned cart email opens another chance to promote your product and remind buyers about the purchase they ditched.
A friendly action won’t do any harm, just make your abandonment cart email outstanding by:
● Writing a captivating subject line
● Emphasizing one specific product
● Producing creative copy – this an excellent opportunity to show off your brand values
● Provide a discount – but be careful with this; shoppers might tend to expect a discount email after each abandoned cart
● If you are running a rewards program, sending cart abandonment emails is an ideal way to remind shoppers how many rewards points they have and encourage customers to spend them.
Simplify the checkout process
As mentioned earlier, 26% of shoppers will leave their cart behind if the checkout process is too complicated or long. Hence, simplifying this process is one of the most effective methods to stimulate more consumers to finish their purchases.
You can reduce the checkout time to the point where shoppers are not required to enter much more than their name, phone number, email address, and credit card details.
Moreover, it is also necessary to enable shoppers to save their information for the next time. That can save them from re-entering the same information every time they want to buy from your store.
Allow guests to make a purchase
Convenience is the key thing when it comes to shopping online. While some shoppers don’t mind registering user accounts to buy products, others wish to be in and out as fast as possible.
For that reason, you should reduce the signing-up steps or provide guest check-out.
For instance, ASOS allows customers to sign in to their accounts using their Twitter, Facebook, or Google accounts. Customers have instant access to user accounts, and businesses receive the information they need to complete the order.
Macy’s enables its buyers to check out as guests if they aren’t willing to sign up for an account.
Offer free shipping
Suppose you add an item to your shopping cart with the price of $20. During the checkout process, you find that your shipping fee is $15, and your total order costs $35.
Would you be ready to pay for this purchase?
Like most customers, you may want to leave that site and shop around for a better deal.
To solve this problem, you can raise the price of your products and offer free shipping. Instead of exiting your store, customers will feel happy and willing to pay to get the product.
Leverage trust badges and social proof
Trust badges are small markers or icons that allow your customers to know that your Shopify store is secure. The badges work as a money-back guarantee stamp or secure payment methods at checkout.
These small icons can help increase customer confidence in your site, products, and services. Trust badges are recommended to be used throughout your website, not just at checkout.
What about social proof?
Social proof proves that other customers have experienced, loved, and spoken positively about your products or services. There are numerous forms of social proof, but social proof notification is considered the most effective one.
Social proof notifications are small messages that pop up when somebody has positively interacted with your brand. You can consider showcase these notifications when a shopper:
● Signs up for a newsletter
● Registers a webinar
● Makes a purchase on your store
To add social proof to your Shopify store, you can choose Proofo – Social Proof from Avada Commerce. The module comes with a variety of notifications, such as purchase notice, sign up notice, add-to-cart notice, review notice, etc. Supporting photo reviews is one of the most important selling points of this extension. It can help admins to acquire stunning photo reviews from customers and organize the review section effectively.
The reviews of previous shoppers can be considered the most vital element, motivating those who have the intent to make a purchase quickly. That’s how you can escalate your sales dramatically.
Conclusion
Shopping cart abandonment is bound to happen, but you can reduce it.
Every e-commerce business confronts cart abandonment to some extent, no matter how successful they are. As a store owner, you can try some of the above practices to combat shopping cart abandonment. Those practices also help boost your Shopify shop’s conversion rates and generate more sales consequently.
Take time to test what tactic works best for your online business!
Author bio: Ellie Tran is a content creator at Avada Commerce. She loves watching movies, baking, and traveling. She always desires to learn more about marketing, especially content marketing, to gain helpful skills and knowledge.
