How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?

A potential customer, Emma, visits your online store, browses your products and adds a trending headset to her cart. However, she abruptly leaves the shopping site and never completes the purchase. This digital ghosting, known as cart abandonment, haunts almost every online retailer. In 2023, the rate of carts abandoned online hit 70% , the highest mark since 2013. This implies a surge of over 10 percentage points from the beginning of the period studied. Hence, to combat this challenge and drive revenue growth, ecommerce businesses must implement strategies to significantly reduce shopping cart abandonment .??

What is Shopping Cart Abandonment????

Shopping cart abandonment happens when a shopper adds products to their cart but exits the website before completing the purchase. This can occur at any touchpoint, either before or during the checkout process, resulting in an incomplete transaction. Hence, decreasing cart abandonment rates remains a primary goal for retailers as it directly hampers sales and brand reputation. The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.19%, often due to website glitches, security issues, or complex checkout processes.?

You can calculate shopping cart abandonment rate like this,?

Cart Abandonment Rate = 1 - (Number of Completed Purchases) / (Number of Purchases Initiated) X 100?

What are the common causes of cart abandonment??

Before discussing the ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment, it's essential to identify the common causes to address the issue.??

1. Unprecedented Extra Costs?

Approximately 48% of customers abandon their carts after discovering costs like shipping charges and taxes, which increase the final amount.

Also read: 18 shopping cart abandonment statistics in 2024

2. Mandatory Account Sign-up?

Almost 26% of shoppers leave a website owing to frustration with the mandatory account creation required to complete their purchases.

3- Security Concerns?

Trust issues contribute to cart abandonment, with about 25% of customers leaving sites due to concerns about sharing sensitive information.?

4- Delayed Delivery Duration?

Around 23% of customers leave without purchasing because of dissatisfaction with the estimated delivery time, revealing delays influencing their decisions.?

5- A Complex Checkout Process?

Approximately 22% of shoppers abandon their carts due to a lengthy or cumbersome checkout flow with numerous form fields.?

11 Proven Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate?

To effectively reduce cart abandonment in e-commerce, it’s essential to implement a few targeted strategies that can improve user-experience.??

1. Display the Total Amount Upfront?

To reduce shopping cart abandonment, you must display the complete pricing, including taxes, shipping, etc., upfront on the product page. This transparency avoids surprising customers with unexpected charges at checkout, building trust and encouraging them to complete their purchases.?

2. Add a Guest Checkout Option

Requiring customers to create an account can discourage them, especially first-time visitors, wasting their time and causing cart abandonment. Instead, offer a guest checkout option with minimal fields such as name, billing address, and payment method to simplify access.?

3. Use a Reliable eCommerce Platform

A trustworthy e-commerce platform reduces cart abandonment rates by ensuring a frictionless website, intuitive navigation, and an optimized checkout flow. This includes fast-loading pages, secure transactions, authentic customer reviews, testimonials, etc., which enhance the shopping experience and boost conversion rates.??

4. Streamline the Delivery Process

Providing accurate information about shipping and estimated delivery dates helps build trust and significantly reduces cart abandonment. You can ensure this by providing real-time updates and collaborating with shipping carriers offering on-time delivery to meet customer needs.?

5. Clarify Return Policies Concisely

Customers usually complete a purchase when they are confident about their ability to return an item if required. By providing outright information on return windows, conditions, and the steps involved, you can foster loyalty and prevent cart abandonment.??

6. Offer Multiple Payment Options

A staggering 13% of customers will exit from a site if they don’t find sufficient payment methods. Hence, you must tailor payment options catering to your customers’ preferences, as different age groups and demographics have unique choices.??

7. Use Retargeting Campaigns

Sending personalized reminders to customers about their abandoned carts via email or texts can make them return to your site. Retargeting strategies can boost conversion rates by up to 150% and enhance website traffic by at least 700% .?

8. Ensure Live Chat Support

Implementing live chat support allows you to provide round-the-clock and personalized assistance to customers by answering their questions immediately. Approximately 41% of customers expect real-time support through live chat, as opposed to assistance via email or phone.?

9. Boost Page Loading Performance

Slow load times equal lost revenue. Lagging product pages and checkout processes often frustrate customers and result in abandoned carts. To avoid this, you must compress large files, optimize images, minimize redirects, conduct A/B testing and ensure a responsive UI.??

10. Use Progress Indicators During Checkout?

By implementing progress indicators, such as numbered circles or bars, you can show customers their progress during checkout, reducing confusion. This visual mapping of steps ensures smooth user-experience, and encourages completion, leading to lower cart abandonment and higher conversion rates.?

11. Simplify the Overall Checkout Process

To reduce checkout abandonment, you should optimize the entire process and boost consumer engagement, ideally keeping 8 form fields . To achieve this, you should focus on collecting only essential details like shipping address, payment info, and contact information.??

Wrapping Up

To thrive in this competitive world of e-commerce, you must ensure a seamless shopping experience across all devices. Cart abandonment during checkout is a recurring issue, thus addressing usability concerns is imperative. By resolving this hurdle, e-commerce businesses can boost conversion rates by 35.26% and recover up to 260 billion USD . Hence, to reduce shopping cart abandonment you must implement the above-mentioned strategies effectively and remain responsive to customer preferences. This will not only help in recovering lost revenue but also enhance your brand reputation by fostering customer satisfaction.??

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