The greatest obstacle for eCommerce – Cart Abandonment

Imagine you are browsing through fashion shopping sites, and like the new season fashion trend. You then start adding dresses in your shopping cart, only to be distracted by a message from your friend inviting you for a coffee at Starbucks. You suddenly close all your tabs to get ready and never return. This is what is called ‘Cart Abandonment’.

Cart Abandonment is one of the most pivotal problems faced by eCommerce Retailers. According to Statista, in 2019, 69.57 percent of digital shopping carts were abandoned, worldwide.

 

Source: Statista

Some of the common reasons why users drop before checkouts are:

Despite many efforts, it is inevitable to mitigate the risks entirely. However, it can be reduced remarkably by following simple steps and techniques.

Before we go into the ways to reduce cart abandonment, let’s look at why it is called “every online retailers’ worst nightmare”.

The Impact:

Cart abandonment is a problem that can cut deep into your bottom line.

Recent research concluded that shoppers ditch 68% of online shopping carts at the order checkout page. It means that for every dollar of business you are doing, you are losing twice in abandoned carts.

As a marketer, that's an open challenge – “how to delight customers and get more business by reducing shopping cart abandonments?”.

It’s a day in and out struggle as to how to control your revenue leakages via reduced cart abandonment. But do you know, with checkout optimization, you can recover up to $260 billion in eCommerce sales?

Let’s talk about how you can achieve this.

Here are our 8 preferred choices to combat abandonments and grow your revenues:

1. Be transparent with your pricing

25% of shoppers do not complete the shopping process due to extra high additional costs at the checkout. (Source: Statista)

Be transparent with your customer as to what you will be charging before they finalize the product for purchase. Show up the total cost (Shipping cost, any other cost) upfront. Better to display a shipping cost calculator before the checkout to calculate the cost. Another option is to offer reduced shipping costs (if possible) by providing free or discounted (promotions/coupons) on the order value.

 

2. Simplify user journeys to checkout

Generally, it is observed the more clicks users do, the more frustrated they get. It ruins their navigation experience and interest in shopping.

Ideally speaking (but depends on an individual basis) user should have 3-4 clicks max to do the final checkout and place the order.

We suggest keeping the site navigation clean and simple. Present your categories that are easy to identify in a layout, making product selection easy and quick. Example, Provide “Quick Preview ^→ Add to Cart” rather than users first navigating to PLP and then PDP pages before adding the items to cart.

 

3. Convey trust in maintaining customer sensitive data.

Once a customer comes to your site for shopping, he/she puts faith in you in disclosing his/her personal details/financial details with your site. Before sharing, if he is not confident that his/her data will be safe with you, they might turn back and drop off.

You must implement some mechanism to make the customer believe that their data is safe with you and some of the possible options can be

4. Show pop-up before the customer leaves without purchase.

It is observed that this approach works in retaining the customer back to make the purchase on your site. You can design your pop-up content around

5. Create a better visual story around products

There is a significant difference between online shopping and physical shopping. In online shopping, you really can not touch and feel the product. The only way you reach your selection criteria is by viewing the product images. So think through while defining the visual representation of the products like:

6. Offer Guest Checkout Options

According to Invesp, this is one of the primary reasons for cart abandonment. Asking so much information and complicated checkouts make customers leave shopping in the middle and leave the site.

By offering a guest checkout option, you might lose out on some information which could be helpful in the marketing campaigns, but the reality is that it is exactly what customer wants. If you offer a frictionless online shopping experience, there is a possibility that your previous customers might revisit you, and this time opt-in to create login accounts to take advantage of your loyalty programs/other incentives.

 

7. Identify business leaks spots

Do not presume your customer journeys. It might be possible that the site has a high footprint on the landing page but as the user navigates or reaches the checkout page this trends moves down. So in the overall user journey, it is essential to understand where and at which stage the customer leaves out. This can help you to revisit or redefine your eCommerce strategy. By integrating Google Analytics one can examine the visitor flow and conversion pathways.

 

8. Optimize page load times

A report by Akamai says

“ A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent”

“A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent”

Retailers are not just losing money; this is also harming their brand reputation.

Although with most of the products being on-cloud nowadays, on-page optimization mostly depends on cloud infrastructure settings. However, the good news is: there are some means, at the implementation level, which you help in improving the page load times. Some key elements that can be taken care of are:

• Image sizes – Optimize images to maintain a balance between quality and size for faster downloads.
• Limit the use of ad trackers – Analyse and evaluate if trackers are required and can provide the benefits.
• Proper tags – Poorly implemented tags, for example, poor product description can cause almost 30% of your customers to abandon the cart.
• Social plugins – Today, shoppers are looking for social proofs; social links can make or break a purchase.
• Other bloats – Closely monitor the size of a webpage in terms of content, JavaScript, etc. to avoid bloating.

There are still some other elements, which are not directly under control; for example – when a user clicks the Checkout button, he encounters a delay due to slow payment processing by the gateway provider. In these scenarios, always put a loading bar or visual element to ensure some progress is happening at the other end.

 

CONCLUSION

As I mentioned earlier, causes for cart abandonment vary from site to site, but what is more important is to identify them quickly and then plan out a strategy. If there is a process in place to identify, strategize, and regularly improve web/mobile experience, it can lead to around 70-80% reduction in cart abandonment.

We at Altudo are committed to helping you identify the causes, strategize a plan, and bring best practices to bring down your cart abandonment. We involve you with our team of experts who personalize their consultation to support your business growth.

For any questions, details, or next-level conversation, please reach out to me at sandeep.singh@altudo.co