You spend a lot of time and money getting people to your eCommerce store, where every lost sale costs you. There are many reasons that people come to your site and never even put an item in the cart. But, what about those that do add items to the cart and walk away? What causes someone to get to that point and not move forward? Is there anything you can do to reduce your cart abandonment and regain those sales?
Before you can answer these questions, you have to understand what a cart abandonment rate is and what the top causes are for a person to leave something in their cart.
What Is The Abandoned Cart Rate And Why Is It Important?
The cart abandonment rate is the percentage of people that put something in the shopping cart and then don’t make a purchase. Regardless of what you do, your cart abandonment rate will never be zero. However, it’s important to know what your cart abandonment rate is, because it could be higher than normal. According to the Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping abandonment cart rate is 69.80%.
How do you find your cart abandonment rate? You will calculate the number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created by site visitors. Once you have that value, multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
What Causes an Abandoned Cart?
There are many reasons that a potential customer leaves items in the cart and doesn’t go through with the purchase. Here are a few reasons to consider:
- Calculating shipping costs and taxes – without putting an item in the cart and going through part of the process, a consumer doesn’t know how much the actual price of the item will be. Retailers lose a lot of customers at this point because the consumer gets sticker shock.
- Lack of trust – it’s no surprise that giving payment information to an unknown website on the internet causes people to pause. Once the user gets to the payment screen, if they don’t have enough payment options or the process seems at all difficult to understand, they will not go through with the purchase.
- Just browsing – many people are just browsing online and put things in their cart just in case they decide to move forward with it. Oftentimes, they’ll go to other shops and compare before making a final decision.
How to Prevent an Abandoned Cart
Regardless of what the average abandonment rate is across the internet, you should focus on reducing your percentage. There are things you can put in place that can help to prevent an abandoned cart.
- Be transparent with your pricing so customers are not shocked by their order total.
- Offer a generous refund policy so the customer feels confident they can return the product if they aren’t satisfied. Making sure your shop terms are clearly labeled in the footer is helpful.
- Put items in the shop on sale or create coupon codes to entice first-time buyers and build brand loyalty.
- Make sure the checkout process is simple and easy to follow.
- Provide live chat support on the site so if a customer has a question or needs help, someone is available to answer them. We recommend using a chatbot or live chat system like Tidio.
What Can an eCommerce Shop Owner Do About Loss of Orders?
Even if you put additional strategies in place to reduce the percentage of cart abandonment, installing an abandoned cart plugin and creating an email sequence can help you to decrease your losses. With this plugin and email campaign, you can build trust with a customer, offer them discounts, and stay at the forefront of their mind when they are ready to make a purchase.
Installing this plugin and creating automatic emails could be the key to recovering a significant amount of sales that you’re missing out on. Here’s a look at how one of our clients recovered 40% of their abanadoned cart orders.
(I’m using this blog to encourage the use of Abandon Cart plugin, which on a current client’s site of mine – within 1 month of using an abandoned cart plugin – with automatic emails, we have recovered $3k in revenue and 40% of abandoned orders)
How Our Client Used An Abandoned Cart Plugin to Recover 40% More Of Their Orders
Here’s a deeper look at how our client has been able to recover 40% of their abandoned orders.
What We Did
We installed an abandoned cart plugin on our client’s website on October 16 and set up an automatic email campaign. This campaign was set up to email customers that have left items in their cart.
Total Recovered Revenue
From October 16 – November 16 (one month span), our client achieved a total percentage of recovered orders after the abandonment of 45.28%.
Here is the breakdown of orders left in the cart:
- Recoverable Orders Possible – 24
- Total Possible Recoverable Revenue – $4194.92
After we installed the abandoned cart plugin and set up the automatic email, here is the result:
- Total Recovered Orders – 16
- Total Recovered Revenue – $3446.02
Update as of August 5, 2022
- Total Recovered Orders – 96
- Recovery Rate: 58.9%
- Total Recovered Revenue – $16,625
As you can see, adding this plugin allowed them to tap into a larger number of orders that would have otherwise been lost. If you have an eCommerce store, we highly recommend that you install this on your site and optimize the Abandoned Cart emails that are sent out.
Contact Us Today
If you have an eCommerce store and want to increase your sales with an abandoned cart plugin, reach out to us today. We’ll work with you to increase your recovery rate and help you tap into potential sales like we have done for our other clients.
