Shopping cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts a check out process for an online order but drops out of the process before completing the purchase. Any item that enters the shopping cart but never makes it through the transaction is considered to be abandoned by the shopper.
How to calculate Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate:
The Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate is expressed as a ratio. It is calculated by dividing the total number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created. Subtract the result from one and then multiply by 100 for the final metric.
Why Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate is important:
Let's say your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate is high, this means that several of your customers begin their purchase process but never complete the transaction. The abandoned items are potential revenue that you are not obtaining as the transactions are not completed, which of course does not help your bottom line.
This ratio is an important metric for eCommerce and retail teams to keep measure because a high abandonment rate could signal a poor user experience or broken sales funnel. Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate leads directly to more sales and revenue, so optimizing the checkout flow a core area of focus for teams.
How to improve Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate:
A/B test your call-to-action
Running A/B tests on calls-to-action can give you further insights on important aspects of the checkout process. A traditional A/B test presents your website visitors with two different versions of a page. Fifty percent receive one version and the other 50 percent sees the variation. Based on conversion rates, you can figure out which CTA performs the best. The benefit of this approach is that you never lose traffic on an underperforming variant and your losses are minimized.
Email campaigns
Implement an email campaign to motivate customers to return to the site and complete their purchases, thereby recovering the abandoned carts and retrieving much of that potential revenue. You can capture the visitor’s email address when they enter it in the checkout form. There are many strategies you can implement to capture more email addresses, such as improving the checkout form and using exit intent pop ups.
Optimize for mobile
If your site doesn’t use responsive design or a mobile-friendly site, you will continue to lose revenue. For instance, a non-optimized site will have a checkout form that’s difficult or impossible to fill out on a tiny screen. In tools such as Google Analytics there are several ways to filter your engagement by mobile devices.
Keep building trust
One problem that much of eCommerce faces is the issue of trust. Although consumers have grown more comfortable in providing their credit cards over the internet, many still are hesitant to provide their financial information to unfamiliar websites. Different solutions can be implemented to increase said trust, such as including reviews and testimonials, incorporating security statements, featuring pictures of real customers, and offering money back guarantees.
Address concerns in real-time
We are big fans of Intercom here at Yaguara. Adding live chat can help ensure your team is available to answer customers’ questions during a real-time transaction. If a customer doesn’t know whether or not to buy your product because of a quick question, you can answer it before the move on to the next store. This also humanizes the experience that is often felt during in-person transactions.
