Cart abandonment is the arch-enemy of e-commerce brands. Despite global e-commerce brands spending $23.5 billion on digital ad campaigns, they only achieve an average conversion rate of a little over 2.5 percent. That seems like a giant obstruction to growth!
Understanding why your users leave without making a purchase and addressing that gap can be immensely helpful. How helpful? Well, you can recover up to 60 percent of the sales lost due to abandoned carts. Yay!
This blog will be your reference guide to minimizing cart abandonment and maximizing e-commerce transactions via proven abandoned cart best practices.
Let us get going!
Actionable Cart Abandonment Statistics for E-Commerce
The following are some critical cart abandonment statistics prevalent in a majority of the e-tail niches. These will accurately portray how deep the problem is before we attempt to fix it.
The average cart abandonment rate across all the e-commerce domains is above 69 percent.
That means the cart abandonment challenge is uniform across e-commerce businesses. It points to some fundamental challenges that most brands don’t identify and address for maximizing conversions.
Cart abandonment rate for mobile users is higher than 85 percent.
E-commerce brands that do not optimize their customer journey vis-a-via mobile see a much higher rate of products abandoned at the checkout.
Checkout optimization alone can boost e-commerce sales conversions by up to 35.62 percent.
Optimizing the checkout gateway experience and minimizing the number of steps required to make the payment alone can score your business more sales!
Slow-loading pages cause 57 percent of the shoppers to leave without making a purchase.
In the age of impulse-shopping and instant digital gratification, customers will leave their carts at the checkout if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, 80 percent of such users won’t return to the brand again unless nudged correctly.
Other top factors that encourage customers to abandon their carts
- Hidden costs or extra costs that are not revealed beforehand remain the number one reason for customers to leave without purchasing anything
- The mandate to create an account for purchasing is the second most prominent reason why customers abandon their digital carts
- 55 Percent of the shoppers will abandon their loaded e-commerce shopping cart if they have to re-enter their card/payment details all over
These stats are just the tip of the iceberg for the e-tail cart abandonment problem. Though, addressing these with smart automation tools and personalization strategies can uplift your revenue massively.
How to Calculate the Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate for your E-store?
Calculating your current cart abandonment rate is simple. Just follow the formula depicted in the below image;
For a given period, divide your total number of successfully completed transactions by the total number of transactions initiated or the total number of carts created. Multiply the number by 100 and subtract from 1. You’ll get the cart abandonment rate for the given time period.
6 Best Practices to Recover Abandoned Carts in 2021
No challenge can confront a meticulous strategy and resilient implementation. Owing to e-commerce growth for its customers, team Wigzo has compiled a list of best practices for your e-commerce brand.
Follow these to crack your abandoned cart recovery goals.
#1. Optimize your checkout and payment process
As we’ve pointed before, a poor checkout and payment gateway experience can result in plummeting sales. The reasons for this can be lack of trust, slow checkout page load speed, lack of multiple payment options, poor mobile checkout optimization, and so on.
One of the abandoned cart best practices is to provide a seamless checkout experience for your customers. Take the help of the following checklist to get started;
- Use trust certificates and security badged during the checkout process
- Ensure a lightning-fast page load speed at every step
- Optimize your e-store checkout for mobile
- Allow multiple payment options (as it is a comfort zone for many customers)
- Use product thumbnail images throughout the checkout process
#2. Maintain pricing transparency
Introducing hidden charges and unexpected shipping costs can be a big turn-off for customers. To stay on their good, loyal side, make sure that you keep all the charges transparent. The customer must always know the final price that they are going to pay right from the beginning. This will bolster business-customer trust and enhance your conversions.
#3. Automate your abandoned cart recovery ops over WhatsApp, SMS, and Email
What if the carts are already abandoned, and you have a list of customers who ‘almost’ made those purchases? Well, it is time for action. Nudge them with personalized and contextual communication to tell them that they got a great deal. In fact, automating your abandoned cart recovery communication will help you recover up to 60 percent of those lost sales.
AI-based automation tools like Wigzo use advanced e-commerce analytics and CRM data to send personalized cart recovery communication over WhatsApp, SMS, and abandoned cart emails. One click and the user is taken back to the checkout page with all the original products in the cart.
Then, bam! Before you realize you lost a cart, you convert one!
#4. Allow guest checkout
Why force your users to go through the trouble of creating an account in a world where time & energy are money? Many of the newly acquired customers don’t want the hassle of going through the account registration process – they simply want to pick their product, pay, and leave.
Allow a guest checkout facility on your e-store. The guests will eventually turn into loyal brand advocates in return for your thoughtfulness.
#5. Auto-apply coupons
Hey, we know it is super cool of you to offer discount coupons. And, it wouldn’t hurt if you went the extra mile to auto-apply it for your shoppers! If you can automate your entire marketing operation, you can automate a few bits for your shoppers – and they’ll only reciprocate with love.
#6. Do include social proof
No matter how great they are, new brands and products are perceived as a risk by first-time consumers. What is the brand is a dud? What if the product is not as great? What if I fell into a money-lost trap? E-commerce customers apply all these filters on a service or a product if it has no reviews.
You can fix this by including customer testimonials, reviews, and ratings on your product page.
What’s more?
For brands that have been plagued by growth challenges like cart abandonment, omnichannel personalization, and ad optimization, we recommend you go through our free eBooks, blog, and other learning resources.
In case you want to cut your team some slack, time, and resources for maximum ROI, we recommend you take Wigzo for a FREE spin.
Happy selling 🙂
