If you own an ecommerce store, you need to combat an enemy that’s been threatening many online entrepreneurs for years. Shopping cart abandonment may sound like a harmless word, but statistics reveal that it’s a major cause of losing potential revenue.
In this blog, we’ll explore shopping cart abandonment, including statistical data to get insights on how serious of a problem it really is. Moreover, we’ll also cover the reasons and effects of shopping cart abandonment. More importantly, we’ll talk about how you can reduce cart abandonment plus give you a look at a website builder that could give you real-time stats on your online store.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment refers to the stage wherein a customer places a product or products into his or her cart but doesn’t proceed to checkout. In real life scenario, this would mean putting items into a shopping cart but never reaching the cashier station to record the purchases.
While it may seem like a minuscule problem, shopping cart abandonment stats will tell you otherwise. According to Website Builder, statistics showed that the average rate of shopping cart abandonment is 65.23% in 2021. To put it into perspective, imagine having 100 prospective customers, each potentially making a purchase worth $10. With the stats we have at hand, we know that 65 out of 100 potential buyers didn’t proceed to check out their items. That could have been a potential revenue of $650.
In 2020, shopping cart abandonment stats were even more staggering. During that year, the rate of abandonment was 75.71%. The numbers even go higher if we take a look at mobile users, with an abandonment rate of 85.65%.
So why is shopping cart abandonment a problem for retailers? If it isn’t clear yet, this means that ecommerce stores, especially small ones, lose potential revenue. Income or revenue is the lifeblood of any business. Without it, there wouldn’t be enough cash to pay employees, maintain your online store, or have funds to implement a marketing strategy. Shopping cart abandonment creates this snowball effect, though at times not directly related, but are somehow interconnected at certain points.
Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment
Buyers don’t just leave their carts without checking out for no reason. If you think of it, they may have been comparing various products before deciding to add one into their cart. This may take a long process, so why would they waste time not completing a purchase? Here are a couple of reasons why:
- The Checkout Process is Not Streamlined
One of the reasons for online shopping cart abandonment is the fact that the checkout process is confusing. A lot of times ecommerce websites have a streamlined shopping experience until the point where a buyer needs to checkout.
If they were in an actual store, they want the checkout process to be fast, convenient, and straightforward. The same thing goes for online shopping. Put yourselves in their shoes and imagine being met with unwanted pop-ups and irrelevant discount offers. You wouldn’t immediately proceed to checkout either.
- Lack of Customer Support at Checkout
Digital shopping cart abandonment can be attributed to poor customer service and support. Online store owners often rely too much on their own technology that they forget the essence of human support.
Online assistance is a great way to guide potential buyers. If you can’t hire a person to this for you, you can make your online store using a website builder that supports live chats like Strikingly. We’ll get more into that later in this blog.
- Unexpected Shipping Costs and Delivery Date
Shipping costs are the number one deal breakers when making an online purchase. Buyers are initially willing to purchase a product. However, if the shipping fee is too much or unreasonable in proportion to the total costs of items, most customers would just abandon their carts and shop elsewhere.
Shopping cart abandonment effects can also be traced back to long estimated delivery dates. Although it’s not necessarily your supplier’s fault and distance is definitely a difficult barrier to surmount, most customers are impatient and want to receive their orders as soon as possible. For example, if they need a time-sensitive item (e.g. a birthday present), they need to get the item on or before a specific date. If the delivery date doesn’t confirm that, they’ll just order in a different store.
- Not Enough Payment Options
Online shopping cart abandonment happens when a customer cannot find a payment option that’s convenient for him or her. Some customers may prefer cash-on-delivery, while others prefer to use their credit or debit cards.
When buyers don’t see their payment preference as part of the options, it would lead them to think twice before completing the order. Remember, shoppers buy online for convenience, and not having their preferred payment options is definitely an inconvenience for them.
How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Now that we’ve discussed shopping cart abandonment effects and its reason, we’ll move on to giving you some tips on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Make sure to list a few of these down before establishing your online store:
- Be Transparent to Your Customers
Image taken from Strikingly user website
To address digital shopping cart abandonment, you need to promise complete transparency to your customers. This includes disclosing hidden charges to your products (if any), being honest about the total shipping cost, and giving a precise and realistic order delivery timeframe.
- Include Checkout Indicators
Customers like it when they can get a good grasp of where they are in the buying stage. Indicators are not only great to show how much more a customer has to complete. They’re also a great way to remind customers of just how far they’ve invested into the buying process.
- Establish Easy Navigation Between Store and Cart
It’s natural for buyers to move back and forth before completing an order. Sometimes they add products to their carts only to eventually replace them with something better. Online shopping isn’t a one-way process. Sometimes buyers have to move back a few paces before continuing forwards. Part of making navigation easy is to make web page load time faster and adding links to quickly jump from one page to the next.
- Add Images on The Shopping Cart
Image taken from Strikngly user website
People are generally better at understanding visuals compared to texts. Make sure that images show on a buyer’s shopping cart. This will help them visualize their items and easily add or remove more products as they please.
- Offer Customer Support
As mentioned, one of the reasons for digital shopping cart abandonment is the lack of customer support or online assistance. Consider hiring customer support personnel to manage inquiries and guide buyers in the checkout process. To make things much easier for you, you can create your ecommerce shop with Strikingly. This website builder has a 24/7 live chat feature that allows customers to chat with a representative in real-time.
- Include Customer Reviews
Image taken from Strikingly user website
Adding customer reviews can help motivate a customer to make a purchase. Most buyers tend to shy away from products that don't have reviews or customer feedback yet. Customer reviews instill a sense of trust and credibility towards your products. It may even potentially convince customers to finally purchase an item in your store.
- Offer Various Payment Methods
A variety of payment methods is essential to an online store. You can start by adding popular online payment channels like PayPal. If you create your website with Strikingly, you'll have a feature that enables you to add different payment options. In addition, Strikingly also has functions that allow you to adjust shipping costs easily depending on location.
- Use Store Statistics to Make Informed Decisions
The best part about creating an online store with Strikingly is that you can get site statistics about your business. Just make sure that you have a published site with a simple store section. Once you’ve already recorded a sale, you’ll start to build up store statistics to make sound decisions.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Once you have your ecommerce website up and running, you can now view your site statistics. To do this, just go to your dashboard, then click “Stats” beside “Edit”. You can refer to the image above to better understand the process.
Once you click on “Stats”, you can get various relevant data about your store. These include Revenue, Orders Received, Total Revenue, and Total Revenue Received. You can filter these data based on the last 7 days, last 30 days, last 90 days, or just the past 24 hours.
You’ll also get a short yet comprehensive view of your sales funnel. You’ll see percentages and statistics about your viewed store page, the percentage of those that added products to their cart, those that visited checkout, and the numbers of orders received. From those data sets, you can reprioritize your strategies to combat shopping cart abandonment and potentially make better revenue.
Shopping cart abandonment effects make it harder for online entrepreneurs, especially for small retailers to do business. Follow some of the tips we listed above to combat shopping cart abandonment. More importantly, create your online store with Strikingly to make sure that you have all the wonderful features you need to address shopping cart abandonment like a pro.
