Do you want an easy handbook to reduce cart abandonment? In this article, we will share an easy handbook to reduce cart abandonment.
Today with so many choices from e-commerce websites, customers are not able to decide fast and abandoning their cart. As per the latest report by SalesCycle, the average cart abandonment rate stands at 75.6%. With such a high rate, businesses are losing millions of dollars every year. A recent report by Barclaycard suggests that on average British customer abandons cart worth 30 Euros resulting in almost 18 billion euro lost revenue annually. It is very important to place your strategy to reduce cart abandonment.
With such an amount of lost sales, reducing cart abandonment is one of the top priorities for every e-commerce business. Converting cart abandonment sale cost sale as compared to acquiring new customers is far less and has a high chance of conversions.
What is cart abandonment and what are the types
Most of the visitors do not turn to customers in a single visit. They come to your website, browse through different pages and options but leaves without making any purchase. There are different types of cart abandonment:
Cart Abandonment: Visitor comes to your website and adds a product to their cart. However, before completing the purchase, the visitor closes the website and thus abandoning their cart.
Browse Abandonment: Most Visitors come to your website and browse through various pages and products. After a while, visitors close the website without adding any product to their cart and is called browse abandonment.
What are the top reasons for Cart Abandonment?
There are many reasons for cart abandonment and it varies according to the industry. Let’s look at the reasons for cart abandonment: Baymard did a survey to understand the reasons for cart abandonment by visitors.
Best practices to reduce shopping cart abandonment
As you can see from the above chart, most of the reasons for cart abandonment can be easily improved by following easy practices. Below are the best practices to reduce cart abandonment issues:
Be upfront about cost
One of the most prime reasons for customers to drop out is the final price. During the product, view customer is not aware of the extra costs like shipping, packaging or other costs. At the final checkout page, the extra costs come as a surprise to the customer and results in cart abandonment.
The best way to resolve is to Be Upfront about Cost. On the product page, clearly mention the other costs which are excluded from the pricing. This will let the shopper know all the charges before moving to the next step of buying.
Amazon does it nicely by mentioning them on the product page itself. Below is an example product page from Amazon:
In the product page, Free Delivery is clearly mentioned in the above picture
In the product page, the Delivery charge is clearly mentioned in the above picture
Guest Checkout
Many times website forces the customer to create an account to proceed with checkout. To create an account, the customer has to enter all the details like name, address, and the password. This results in cart abandonment and loss in revenue.
Allow the customer to check out as a guest which means the customer can proceed with completing the purchase without creating an account. A customer has browsed your website and decided to finally make a purchase. However, with forced account creation to complete the purchase deters the customer from completing the purchase. As per the study, a website with no option to check out as a guest resulted in 37% of cart abandonment.
You can easily avoid this by offering the customer to check out as a guest. You can later connect to the customer through e-mail and convince them to create an account. Since the main focus of any e-commerce business is conversions, so let customers convert first and later plan your strategy to make customers create an account as well on your website.
Trust Factor
With so many online frauds happening, customers are more conscious of making payments. For making any kind of online transaction, people have to enter all the details including name, address, credit card details. Apart from card details, below information are usually asked while placing an order online:
Name/Address/Email ID/Phone Number
Mention clearly the reason for each field entry. This will allow the customer to enter details with confidence.
For every website, creating a trust factor is of major concern. Lack of trust leads to an average of 19% of cart abandonment cases. The issue of the trust factor can easily be resolved.
Check out the below ways to create trust factor on customer’s mind;
Trust Badge
Trust badges create a sense of comfort and trust in the customer’s minds. You create a trust badge from top security brands like McAfee, VeriSign, Norton, TrustE and many more. You can use the trust badges on your footer, product pages and also the final checkout/payment page. Baymard did research to understand which trust badge people trust.
Customer Reviews
A study has found that 88% of customers consider customer reviews as a personal recommendation. Before making any purchase or product selection, visitor checks for the reviews of the product. Reviews build trust in the customer’s minds about the product. A good number of the review can increase conversion by 4.6%.
Reviews not only help to build a trust factor but also leads to a quicker decision about the purchase. This, in turn, reduces the number of cart abandonment for your website.
Public reviews on different platforms
There are a lot of third-party platforms and blogs which are completely focused on reviews only. These websites allow authenticated reviews only to be published on their websites. Websites like G2Crowd, Capterra offers platforms to collect review from customers. A good review from customers on these websites creates trust among customers.
*Recently PushEngage has been named top performer under proactive notification software by G2Crowd
There are other websites like toptenreviews that review and compare the products. These websites do a complete research of each product, its features, pros, and cons. This helps the customer to check for the details before making the final purchase. Once a customer is satisfied with the complete details, they will head over to your website and make the purchase. This result is higher conversion and lesser cart abandonment by the customer.
Return Policy
In online shopping, people can’t feel or touch the product. A few things you can do are to show pictures from different angles and also add a video of the actual product. People also go through the reviews before making the final purchase. Despite that many times products are different from what people expected. In order to make the final purchase, a person reads the Return Policy of the product. Only if the return policy offers is satisfactory, the buy the product else abandons the cart. A bad return policy causes 11% of cart abandonment issues.
You can easily solve this by offering a very easy return policy depending upon the product categories. Every industry is different and is the return policy. You can offer Money-Back Guarantee and No Question Asked Return Policy. Keep 30 days of the return policy. A good return policy brings confidence among the people to order a product from your website. You can check out your competitors as well to see what return policy they are offering under a similar category. One of the best examples would be the Amazon Return Policy. They have an easy and detailed return policy for each category.
Delivery Period
Before ordering people would like to know when they will be receiving the product. Don’t overpromise about the delivery time. It’s always good to under promise and under deliver. This will surely increase the customer’s satisfaction.
You can create a separate page detailing about the Shipping and Delivery. Mention all the different shipping types and time to deliver. Also, clearly mention the approximate delivery time on the product page and checkout page. This will reduce the last-minute surprise for the customer. They will know the delivery schedule before making the purchase. This will lead to less cart abandonment and more conversion.
Website Load Time
Website load time is one major contributing factor to page abandonment. Nowadays customers are impatient. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you might be losing half of your customers. An increase in website load time results in an increase in bounce rate which may impact your organic ranking as well. As per Google, 2 seconds and below should be the ideal page load time for any website. As per the study, 1 second of delay results in a 7% reduction in conversion and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
As per the study, if you improve your website speed by 1 second, it leads to a 2% increase in conversion. There are many free tools to check for the website page load and optimization status. One of the most common and good tools to start with is Google Page Speed.
Simple Checkout Process
Keep your checkout flow simple and straightforward with minimal distractions. Checkout flow is the most crucial aspect when comes to conversions. During the checkout flow, clearly mention:
- Product Detail
- Product Image
- Total Number
- Product Price
- Delivery charges
Avoid asking any unnecessary details from the customer, when he is trying to complete the purchase. The checkout flow of Amazon is very simple and effective. Below is the screenshot:
Once the customer enters the checkout flow, the customer cannot browse to any other page. Once the customer completes the purchase, he can browse through the website.
Multiple Payment Options
You do not want to lose customers, who are ready to make the payment but can’t as the preferred payment options are not there. Try to include all the major payment options. The most common options are card payments including debit and credit. Cash On Delivery is also a popular payment option.
Having multiple payments ensures that the customer is able to complete the purchase. You can also come up with different ways to entice the customer to make the purchase. You can offer an easy EMI option, No Cos EMI option. You can even partner with the popular banks to get an extra discount to the customer who pays using their card.
Losing customers because of a lack of payment options is the last thing that you want in your business.
Re-engage To Convert
Many times visitors do not convert in a single visit. One of the important techniques to use push notifications is to re-engage users at the right time. Re-engage with customers in a timely manner to reduce cart abandonment. You can use browser push notification services to re-engage with the user. Using push notifications you can effectively reduce cart abandonment. There are multiple ways you can re-engage with customers once they add the product to their cart:
- Send Message: When customers add a product to the cart, you can send an onsite message to remind him of the product in the cart.
- Show Cart At Top: Once a customer adds the product to the cart, highlight the cart at the top when the customer browses the website. This way the customer will be reminded that his product is still in the cart.
- Onsite Messenger: You can start a conversion on messenger and see if they are facing any issue with the checkout process. This way you will know beforehand about any issue and resolve the same and the customer will not abandon the cart.
Re-target to recover lost revenue
If a customer has abandoned the cart and left the site, you still got a chance to recover your lost revenue. There are many ways to re-target them using different tools. The cost of re-targeting is far less than the cost of acquiring new customers. You should re-target the abandoned cart customers through all channels. Below are some of the effective tools to re-target abandoned cart customers:
- E-Mail: You can send abandoned cart e-mails with all the details. Include product image and all the necessary details with price and link to complete the order. You can even send exclusive coupons for them so that they can complete the order.
- Push Notifications: Using web push notifications, you can send a notification including product image with checkout page link and price. Web Push Notifications are delivered in real-time to customer browser and results in higher open rate and click rate as compared to e-mail. You can create a series of cart abandonment notification campaign to send to the customer at regular intervals. You can include a time-bound coupon code as well so that the customer completes the transaction. In terms of the performance of the cart abandonment campaign, push notification performs 37% better than email. You can also track the revenue generated using cart abandonment push notification.
- Google Ads: For using Google re-targeting ads, you need to place Google pixels on your website. Google ads let you re-target your customers when they visit different websites. Customer may be browsing through other websites or doing a search, Google will show your ads. It increases the reach of your ads and targets customers when they browse. With a repeated display of your ads, the product will be on top of the mind of the customer. This will result in the customer completing the purchase.
- Facebook Ads: To customer Facebook Ads, you need to put the Facebook pixel on your website. Most of the customer will have a Facebook account. Using Facebook, you can re-target your customers when they are browsing Facebook. You can also customer Facebook messenger. You can set an automated Facebook messaging campaign. When the customer abandons their cart and leave your website and goes to Facebook, they will receive a message on the FB messenger with details about their cart. FB messenger has much higher conversion as compared to e-mails.
Above is the few best solution to reduce cart abandonment for an e-commerce website. You can also check your analytics dashboard or install a heat map to understand customer behavior on your site. This way you will know which page or areas customer focuses more before cart abandonment. You can also run a survey asking the top reasons for abandoning the cart. Though you employ the possible strategies to combat cart abandonment, there could be many more reasons which are out of control. However, if you apply the right tactics, it will help you reduce and recover cart abandonment and save you a lot of revenue. Same case with travel websites. They also experience booking abandonment. You can combat booking abandonment by implement optimization strategies.
Case Study – Cart Abandonment Push Notification Campaign
At PushEngage, we understand how important cart abandonment for our clients is. We have created a separate feature exclusively to run the cart abandonment campaign. Below are the case studies of some of the e-commerce website who benefitted with Push Notifications:
Mydeal
Mydeal.com.au is an Australian e-commerce website. They already have all the tools integrated. However, they were looking for a tool that is easy to integrate, advanced and offer better results.
PushEngage has some advanced features specifically for e-commerce. Mydeal opted for PushEngage for their push notifications. Within a short period of time, they got a higher subscription rate, improved the open rate and click rate. Using PushEngage Cart Abandonment Notifications MyDeal.com.au saw an increase in revenue by 20%. Check the below infographics for details.
Ofertia
Ofertia is one of the leading online platforms for publishing offers. For Ofertia, timing is the key. They need to update user at the about the latest offers and sale before the offer expires. They were also looking for ways to increase their subscriber base.
With PushEngage, Ofertia was able to reach customers at the right times. PushEngage allows you to send Web Push Notification to subscriber right on their browser. Using PushEngage, Ofertia was able to get 39% repeat users for their website. Below infographics details the benefits.
BollywoodKart
BollywoodKart is an e-commerce company that deals with fashion apparel. Their main concern was Cart Abandonment. They were looking for ways to reduce the cart abandonment rate.
With PushEngage, they started their cart abandonment push notification campaign. They used the event-based Cart Abandonment campaign which is inbuilt with PushEngage and got a 15% lift in cart abandonment revenue. The below infographic shows the complete details.
