14 Ways to Solve Cart Abandonment

The average documented cart abandonment rate of 68.63% is no joke. Large companies like IBM are constantly facing high bounce rates, and it's interesting to see what exactly they're doing to counteract this. As an e-commerce business owner, you need to know what your average bounce rate is. Once you've set your bounce rate, it's a good idea to look into some of the trends in your own market. Even if you are the leader in your industry, there is always room for improvement. For example, if you currently have a cart abandonment rate of 60%, you can increase it to 50% by the end of the year. Since the cart abandonment problem has been studied in some detail in the past, we will try to give some practical advice on how to solve the cart abandonment problem, mostly without resorting to discounts all the time.

1. Have a sense of urgency with your emails

Abandoned cart emails depend on how fast you send them. Research shows that when an email is sent before the 24-hour mark, you increase your ROI by over 2800%. While shopping for Christmas recently, you left a few items in your shopping cart and planned to come back later. 

The immediacy of the word "steal" was very effective. Conclusions:

• Send abandoned cart emails within the first 24 hours
• Use evocative language and let the buyer know that these items may not be there for much longer.

2. Eliminate the risk people fear

People are afraid of quite a lot of things when shopping online. So you need to minimize risk by understanding why customers leave. Also, a tool like Siteimprove allows you to add feedback fields to your website.

Security can be a major concern for your website visitors and there are ways to deal with it. This can be done through your mall and a quick sign can be the difference between whether you get a sale or not.

Findings:

• Use Feedback Forms to Understand Why People Leave Your Site
• Add security features to your websites, such as reviews, trusted store icons, and payment protection.

3. Be specific about products that have been abandoned.

If a customer leaves your site with a particular item in their cart, they are less likely to come back and buy unless you remind them what they were looking at. Have the image, description and price in the email along with all other items that were listed in the cart. There are fantastic tools on the market like Yotpo that allow you to create reviews for your product.

Why not include those reviews in your email? Frequently asked questions or questions created by customers can give your visitors the answer they were looking for.

Conclusions:

• Include a clear "Add to Cart" button in your email to speed up the process.
• Use product reviews and FAQs in the email to answer a possible customer question.

4. Complete proof testing on an ongoing basis

Some stores do best with a few steps in the checkout, while others are better off with the two-step process. One company which I particularly like is MyProtein.

Instead of clicking on a product that will add another step to the visitor's journey, you can click this button and it will open a popup, which ensures it loads faster than an entirely new page.

As you can see from this, it gives you the option to view additional information, but you can simply complete the purchase by toggling a few buttons.

Findings:

• A/B testing of the checkout process
• Use pop-ups to help visitors add items to their shopping cart faster.

5. Throw the bait and switch to tactics

As customers go through your checkout process, there should be no hidden costs that come to light as they progress. For example, I've been to several sites where they tried to flag some add-ons or include some processing fee at the end. This is especially true for B2B businesses, which tend to list prices before VAT. There are tools from OpenCart and WooCommerce that can help prevent this, whether or not they are disabled for your store.

What works well is adding a freebie to their cart that they may not have been expecting.

It's a fantastic example, we especially like the use of the term "you've qualified" which makes you feel important.

Conclusions:

• Avoid hidden costs!
• Add a freebie to your cart for a nice surprise

6. Ditch attractiveness and focus on clarity

Including humorous and funny content in an abandoned cart email might work for some audiences, but in general, it's best to get straight to the point. This means that the email subject should include a straight line, a brief mention of the products that are still in the cart, and a button so they can complete their purchase. Even a simple text message is great for this. We got it below about an abandoned cart where we were offered another 10% to complete the purchase.

You can't always assume that people left their shopping cart without a purchase because they had a problem.

Findings:

• Keep it simple, maybe someone really forgot about their shopping cart and this is a good reminder.
• Don't be afraid to send simple text emails

7. Use the best tools to bring back users

Many online businesses find that using a newsletter tool like MailChimp is enough for abandoned cart emails. You need automated email software that supports data storage, timely delivery, links to the right products, and maybe even billing information.

Manually sending emails to abandoned cart users can be very time-consuming, so using a tool is vital.

Conclusions:

• Use Software to Send Abandoned Cart Emails
• Segmentation by order value is important.
• Have a high markup on a certain product - offer a discount on this product

8. Offer Live Chat on Your E-commerce Site

People have questions when they buy from your website, and if they go unanswered, they might just walk away without buying anything. Studies have shown that it is the chat that is popular among millennials. In fact, live chat usage on websites has grown from 67% to 81% in 3 years. 

Conclusions:

• Use chat to solve customer problems
• Use a chat if your target audience is millennials

9. Let customers edit their carts when they return

There is nothing more annoying for a buyer than when he is fixated on what he was looking at before. Shopify and Bigcommerce have tools available in their software that allow you to do this.

You must provide your customers with the option to remove this element using the simple cross displayed above. However, it is also recommended to add a minus sign and a plus sign to encourage customers to add more products than they originally planned.

Findings:

• Let customers edit their cart
• Allow them to add more items with a simple toggle button

10. Show how far they've come in the process

One study by Kissmetrics shows that when customers know what stage of the process they are in, they are more likely to complete their checkout. When will it be over?

This ensures that there is an end in sight for the client. Allowing them to return to this process is also important as they had to change their shipping or billing information.

Conclusions:

• Show customers how far along they are in the process with a numerical step or percentage.
• Allow users to go back to a specific checkout step

11. Only ask for billing information after discussing shipping

Imagine how frustrating it must be if you had to enter your credit card information before being asked about shipping charges. They must be given the total cost prior to filling in the credit card numbers.

In addition, you can also show how close they are to free shipping.

It is important to have several different shipping options as people may not want to receive the item anytime soon and may want to keep their costs down.

Conclusions:

• Request payment only after adding a delivery
• Display how close a customer is to free shipping at checkout

12. Be smart with your coupons

A significant number of people assume that they left the online store because they were looking for a coupon on the Internet, but never found it. This means that if you have a coupon for new or loyal customers, it should be easily accessible and visible right on your website.

Displaying the code at the top of your website is considered a good practice as it will be right in front of users.

Using a countdown on your website can also work well for a discount. 

Conclusions:

• Clearly display discount codes on your site
• Use the countdown to create urgency

13. Always keep your cart in plain sight

Is it possible that customers forget that they have already put items in their shopping cart? In fact, this happens more often than you think.

A good option is to allow the following when users hover over their cart:

• Show total price
• Show the quantity of each product
• Include thumbnail images of products
• Show prices for individual products
• Allow visitors to view the cart for editing

Conclusions:

• Allow users to see their cart
• The hover option is more user-friendly and also includes a click to view more information.

14. Remove elements on your site and check out those that are distracting

Some websites are so full of bells and whistles that it intimidates customers. From the home page to the checkout module, don't be a company with a bunch of banners, offers, widgets, and products that pop up all the time when a customer just wants to make a purchase.

The above website has posts about discounts, rewards, contests as well as daily offers. Conclusions:

• Avoid pop-ups too early on your site
• Use one post per front page, otherwise, users won't register any of them.

Are you ready to fix your abandoned cart issues?

Now that you've had a chance to see some of the best ways to fix cart abandonment issues, bookmark this page to help you achieve your own goals in the future.