10 Ways to Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment and Improve Your Conversion Rate

10 Ways to Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment and Improve Your Conversion Rate

You built a great product. You built a great website. You spent on digital marketing. Users came, liked your product, added it to the cart – and never checked out 🙁

You then see abandoned carts piling onto your e-commerce checkout gateway. Does it happen to your business and does it happen often?

Shopping cart abandonment is a common challenge amongst all e-tailers across all niches. Often, users will add products into their cart, and for some underlying reason, leave the products in their cart without making any purchase. 

And, this will happen 7 out of 10 times!

Worry not, however With the right strategic maneuvers and marketing automation, you can recover up to 60% of these otherwise lost sales.

Sounds good? *Yeah*

Let’s get going. 

Here are 10 ways to combat shopping cart abandonment and improve your conversion rate.

1. Cost & Shipping Transparency 

Many e-commerce businesses make the mistake of adding surplus charges and additional shipping costs in the final phase of purchase. This often comes as a surprise to the customer who has another pricing in mind. Lack of transparency in final pricing and shipping details beforehand can demotivate your customers to hit that ‘pay now’ button.

cost and shipping transparency

The best practices to ensure pricing and shipping transparency include revealing them beforehand. For instance, if you sell smartphone covers, tell the user how much would it finally cost including the tax, shipping price (if any), or any other platform fee. 

You’ll notice a drop in the cart abandonment rate!

2. Deploy Exit Intent Pop-Ups

Your website analytics will reveal to you the traffic trends, engagement rate and bounce-rate for your e-commerce store. 

If you have a high bounce rate, it means that your visitors are leaving your e-store for some reason. This can also be correlated to a high cart abandonment rate. If you find that users are engaging well with your products, browsing them and adding them to the digital cart, yet leaving without any purchase, you can deploy Exit intent pop-ups to change their minds at the last minute. 

deploy exit intent popups

Exit-intent messaging can be customized as per the customer segmentation or context. For instance, you can convert a site-leaving customer by offering a last-minute discount code in exchange for their contact info. 

3. Live Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is a powerful way to deliver personalized offers to specific clusters of your target buyers, and boost the overall conversion rate. A report shows that visitors that engaged with at least 3 pages of personalized content converted 3.4% more than others!

customer segmentation

This can be well achieved by popping contextual and personalized offers to targeted customer clusters. 

For e.g. Wigzo’s unique Live Segmentation capability allows you to cluster your customers as per pre-made segments, and drive them to relevant sales funnels. You can group them by cart value and product browsing history to maximize sales conversions. 

4. Trigger Cart Recovery Emails

Timely cart recovery emails sent just after a customer abandons his/her digital shopping cart can help you recover many of the lost sales. However, the timing of the email will determine the fate of every potential sale. Check out the graph below to see the optimum cart recovery email time interval.

cart recovery emails stats

(Source: Neilpatel.com)

5. Leverage WhatsApp Cart Recovery

This channel is so effective in recovering abandoned e-commerce carts that it can help you gain up to 60% of the lost sales if implemented correctly. 

what'sapp cart recovery

Your customers are ever-ready and reachable over WhatsApp – the platform with 1.5 billion active users.

Wigzo has dedicated a separate feature to recovering carts via WhatsApp. Your customers receive a nudge message with the cart recovery link that takes them straight to their original carts with all the products intact in them. They can then make the purchase and checkout. 

You can also read about how to recover up to 60% sales with WhatsApp cart recovery & automation in detail. 

6. Display Checkout Steps & Progress

If your customers are trying to purchase products from your e-commerce site, a ‘blind’ payment process can frustrate them. If they do not know how many checkout steps they have to clear, and how much they have already cleared – they’ll choose to drop the products rather than filling up ‘endless’ details. 

display checkout step and progress

The simplest fix to reduce cart abandonment due to a blind checkout process is to display the number of steps already completed by the user and the number of steps left in completing the purchase. 

They’ll escape the vat of payment uncertainty, and you’ll score a hot sale!

7. Cut Distractions During Checkout

Many new e-commerce businesses make the mistake of misdirecting their customers with additional links and product upselling during the checkout process.

no distraction during checkout

Avoid any such ‘leaks’ or ‘distractions’ that might redirect the customer elsewhere during the payment process. Oftentimes, this includes product recommendation pop-ups, promotional links and banners. One-click and the cart gets abandoned!

Keep your checkout process clean and straightforward to avoid cart abandonment. 

8. ‘Nudge’ Them With Personalized Offers

Choosing a product amongst thousands of options is more of a decision-making burden for the customer than a blessing. Most customers expect personalized product recommendations and offer to go through with a purchase. 

If they browse for a value product and just before the checkout, the thought of ‘more product research’ strikes them, they’ll probably abandon the purchase. 

onsite notifications (nudge)

The best fix for this is using personalized pop-up messages that engage your customers contextually and directs them into the right sales funnel for maximizing conversion probability. For instance, Wigzo’s ‘Nudge’ triggers custom pop-ups (based on the automation rules and customers’ data) for the site visitors that will most likely convert them.  

You can learn more about strategic implementation and the business value of behavioural Nudge here.

9. Recover Carts with SMS Automation

Successful e-commerce brands already know about the power of SMS marketing. It can recover abandoned digital carts as well. 

recover carts with sms automation

Once a customer leaves their filled cart, you can send them an automated cart recovery SMS with the link to their original cart with all the products – just like WhatsApp. SMS works well for abandoned cart recovery because of a high open-rate (98%), a higher CTR (35%), and wide-area coverage over cellular networks.  

10. Allow Multiple Payment Options

It is only rational that your customers might be comfortable using a preferred payment method for online purchases – but your e-commerce site doesn’t allow it for any reason whatsoever. 

multiple payment options

Such a situation would compel your customers to drop their products and bounce back from your website. 

The fix is simple. Allow all the major payment methods on your website – from Debit/Credit cards and UPI to Paypal and Net Banking. 

Still, looking for more e-commerce cart recovery tactics?

Here is an eBook we think would be of great value to your – Proven Ways to Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment [Free Guide]

Stay tuned for our weekly blogs on revving-up your e-commerce marketing, sales and operations!

Rashi Kundra

Rashi Kundra

Rashi is a literature graduate from Delhi University. She is a content writer at Wigzo. In her spare time, you will find her meditating while grooving on EDM beats.

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