Your website can be designed to be impressive, easy to use, and comfortable to browse.
You can offer a variety of products, provide high-quality product images, add videos for each product, and even enable easy and fast purchasing.
However, a significant portion of customers visiting your online store will abandon their shopping carts at some point during their visit.
Don’t take it personally, this is a well-known phenomenon in the e-commerce industry.
As of 2018, about 76% of shopping carts are abandoned!
This means that three out of every four people who have already browsed your site, selected the desired products, added them to their shopping cart, abandon their cart and leave the site without completing the purchase.
So what are the reasons for cart abandonment on e-commerce sites? Why is it such a common phenomenon?
As you may have already understood, this is a fairly common consumer behavior, especially when it comes to online purchases – but why?
The virtual space allows the customer to remain anonymous.
Unlike a physical store, where many customers feel uncomfortable leaving their shopping cart and leaving the store empty-handed after spending time in the store, browsing the products and even receiving help from professional staff, in a virtual store, customers are not exposed, and no one really knows who the customer who abandoned their cart is – so customers do not feel uncomfortable leaving their carts.
Time and place
Most virtual stores allow easy and mobile-friendly browsing, which allows many customers to make transactions and many purchases through their mobile phones at their convenience, whether it’s during a break at work, while waiting in line, or during their daily commute. This also means that customers may not have the time to complete the purchase at the moment, but may return later to do so – or they may simply forget about the purchase altogether.
Technical difficulties and technophobia
Often, people abandon their shopping cart because of technical difficulties during the purchasing process – they don’t understand which required fields to fill out, they can’t connect to the website to complete the purchase, they have trouble redeeming a discount code, and finally they get frustrated with the process and give up on the order.
Customers use their shopping cart to check prices
Many customers use their shopping cart to check the final price they will pay for the products they have chosen – they want to make sure that the discounts and promotions displayed on the website are reflected in the final price. They may not necessarily make the purchase at that moment, but sometimes only after a few days or from another device, and therefore the shopping cart remains full.
So how can we reduce the number of abandoned carts? What actions should we take?
Optimizing the order process
The first thing you need to do to try and minimize the number of abandoned carts on your site is to ensure that the purchasing process on your site is simple, easy and short, so that every user can complete the purchase easily and quickly without encountering technical difficulties or having to fill out too many fields that lengthen the process, frustrate them or cause them to give up on it.
The order completion experience on the site should be positive, fast and simple, so that the customer has no reason to abandon their cart in the middle of the process.
Use of the “abandoned cart” pop-up
A creative and great way to prevent customers from abandoning their cart and to encourage them to complete their order is to use an abandoned cart pop-up.
This pop-up will appear when the customer navigates away from the site with a full shopping cart, reminding them that they have items in their cart and encouraging them to complete the purchase.
You can also offer them a special promotion or discount to further encourage them to complete the purchase.
“Abandoned cart” email
Sending a reminder email to a customer who has abandoned their shopping cart, containing the selected products with direct and quick access to their shopping cart on the website, along with a small incentive (such as a 5% discount), can work wonders and improve conversion rates in your online store.
An abandoned cart email is automatically sent to all customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, according to the time frame you define – you can choose to send the email 6 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours after abandonment, depending on your preference.
Our recommendation is not to wait too long to send the email, so as not to reach a point where the email is no longer relevant to the customer. The reminder email allows customers to remember that they added products to their shopping cart but did not actually place an order, and the incentive given to them in the email motivates them to complete their purchase as soon as possible.
Here is an example of an “abandoned cart” email sent by ASOS:
ASOS has created a well-designed and inviting reminder email that is similar in design to their website, uses their brand language, and offers the customer direct access to the item left in their shopping cart. Create an email that is suitable for your brand, design it to speak in your brand language, and start sending it to customers who have abandoned their carts – the profit will be all yours.
