The average cart abandonment rate is 69.75% which means that only ⅓ of all users who added items to the cart made the purchase. There are different reasons why checkouts are abandoned, e.g., users were just browsing, the website crashed, the return policy was not satisfying, etc.

The good news is that by knowing the issues we can easily provide a shopping cart abandonment solution and decrease the cart abandonment rate. Below you can find a summary of shopping cart abandonment solutions that have helped us to improve conversion rates. And remember – purchase decision starts with the first landing page.

How to Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate?

1. Make Cart and Cart drop-down easy to access

Before the user has started to fill a checkout form, the closest thing to it is a cart page or cart drop-down, therefore you need to make sure that both elements are easy to access and show all the details about added items. What’s more, all functionalities that allow operating with items should work correctly, e.g., increase the quantity or, unfortunately, remove the product.

Here are a few details we suggest revising to decrease the possibility of cart abandonment:

• Is the user notified when a new item is added to the cart?
• Is the cart accessible from any place on the website?
• Is it possible to see how many items are added to a cart from any place on the website?
• Can the user change the characteristics of the product like size, quantity, and color in the cart?

Although it might seem very obvious initially, there are websites out there that still don’t provide one or more of these functionalities. For example, one of our clients didn’t show their users any notification that an item is added to the cart. That resulted in multiple clicks on the “Add to Cart” button and frustrated users that left the cart uncompleted.

Another example? The cart was accessible only after the user was on PDP. Don’t put your customers into such torment and lead them to checkout smoothly!

2. Implement a logical visual hierarchy toward the checkout

After the user has added all the items in the cart and adjusted details, guide him further, so the click on the checkout button is intuitive and made without thinking.

Once, a client’s shopping cart had the most important buttons (Continue Shopping, Checkout, and Remove) all in the same color. The main CTA button was added on other pages in the same color, therefore customers got confused at first but then started to contemplate – maybe continue shopping and look for better options, or remove some items/ reduce the quantity.

Due to lack of instant answer of what to do next user might abandon the cart or reduce the quantity of added items.

Another issue related to logical hierarchy is adding only 1 checkout-related button on the mobile version of your website. As users might add many products, don’t force them to scroll down to the very end of the page! Implement a second button in a sticky header. Just make sure that it really looks like a button and not like breadcrumbs.

3. Do not force registrations

In a research by the Baymard Institute, 35% of the respondents mentioned that being asked to create an account to make a purchase is one of the main reasons for checkout abandonment. Although it might seem like a great opportunity to collect user email addresses for them it’ll be one more account somewhere out there on the web that he soon probably forgets the password to.

If you decide that My Account is strongly suggested, remember to emphasize the advantages of how it will help the user. Will it save address details? Will it show previous orders or give special bonuses? And definitely show the option to create an account after the checkout.

Speaking of real case studies, in the checkout of a client of ours, the first step was to click on the hover window – to log in or proceed as a guest. Until the user chose one of the options, checkout was not available. As soon as we removed the hover window and made guest checkout the default one, the conversion rate increased.

4. Reduce the price shock

Yay, the user is in the last step before making a purchase! Unfortunately after filling in the shipping details a new, previously unknown cost appears.

To avoid situations when a customer leaves the checkout only because of unexpected details, inform him earlier, e.g., allow him to make shipping calculations on the cart page or if there will be added taxes include this information on PDP. Although at first, it might seem silly, it should help to reduce the cart abandonment rate.

Imagine you’ve found the most desirable item and now your imagination goes wild – you’ve felt it on you, you’ve thought about compliments others will send your way, and you’re just excited. But then you reach the checkout and extra costs appear, sometimes even higher than the product itself. At this moment there’s probably a volcano in your imaginary wonderland beginning to erupt and all dreams are gone. Now imagine you were informed about some extra costs in PDP when you decided that’s the item for you, some – on the cart and some in the checkout.

There’s a big difference whether you see a big number once or a smaller number a few times.

5. Provide help when it’s needed

It’s always a good idea to show the contact details of customer service. I.e., if a customer makes a purchase in a physical store – there’s immediately a consultant there to help him in case of questions. The same thing is expected from an online store. What’s more, people are lazy and not always ready to look for specific details, e.g., what’s the return policy and how does it work. Besides, why should users do this if your brand representatives can give a more detailed answer and provide the best solution?

Another important thing to keep in mind is that different users prefer different channels to communicate – for some it will be more convenient to talk by phone, for some to have a live chat, or someone might want to use social media.

6. Abandoned cart emails

Not all checkouts get completed. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about abandoned carts. Instead, prepare a plan on how to motivate customers to complete the purchase. There are different strategies but we suggest starting with an easy 3-step plan:

1. Remind users what they’ve left behind. There can be many reasons why the checkout was not completed and one of them is that it wasn’t an appropriate moment. By sending the abandoned cart email you give users a second chance to get what they originally wanted.
2. Create an urgency, e.g., that only five items are left or that recently there has been a big activity around the specific items user chose.
3. Offer users a gift, e.g., free shipping. This is the trickiest step from the business perspective, therefore be sure that customers don’t get spoiled as some might start to leave checkout only to receive a gift.

7. Retargeting Ads

There’s a common trend for all eCommerce stores that even though the majority of users are new visitors, the conversion rate of returning visitors is much higher. Due to this, one of the opportunities to reduce the amount of abandoned carts is to re-target customers that already have visited the website.

This can be done by showing specific ads to customers to remind them of products they’ve added to cart. The method is based on cookies or website data stored on your browser. Popular sources to show these ads are Facebook, Instagram, and Google in which you can create different segments of users based on page views, location, or the number of sessions.

Got more questions about shopping cart abandonment software? Need help optimizing your website? Check out our conversion rate optimization services, drop us a line at [email protected] or contact us right here within the orange chat bubble to your right.

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