eCommerce website owners constantly struggle with abandoned carts.
Users arrive in their online shop, add several products to their shopping carts, and leave the website. Shop owners want and need to know why!
It’s extremely frustrating for ecommerce website owners. It can also be difficult to know for certain WHY it’s happening. There are a range of issues to check, and fixes you can implement, to help solve abandoned carts.
1. Check your website analytics
Before you do anything else, you need to compare how many users are landing on your website vs how many orders you are receiving. If you have low or no website traffic, abandoned carts might not be your problem. You might just have too little traffic to show significant conversions to sales.
If you DO have website traffic, then check which pages users are visiting. They must be landing on shop and product pages, or ecommerce category pages, if there’s any hope of them buying anything.
Google Analytics is the perfect tool for this. It should be setup and running from the moment your website is live. This way, you will have a history of data to check.
2. Specialised ecommerce tracking analytics are needed to track abandoned carts
The standard Google Analytics setup does not include detailed ecommerce tracking. This tracking must be specifically setup on your ecommerce website so you can see accurate user activity.
You must be able to track events like ‘view product’, ‘add to cart’, and ‘checkout’, to name a few. If you have this tracking enabled, you can see how many users ‘add to cart’ but leave the page before (or even after) checkout. Maybe they make it as far as your payment gateway but never complete the payment?
Accurate analytics will help you to determine their movements on your website so you can see where they are moving around. If you know where they are, you can deduce how or why they arrived there.
3. Check your shipping
Some websites are badly laid out and customers can only see their shipping costs on the checkout page. Maybe they only expected to pay the product price, and now they must pay extra for shipping?
This is a common reason for abandoning online shopping carts. However, it can be avoided with some clever techniques:
Use ‘Flat Rate Shipping’
- Flat Rate Shipping is when an ecommerce shop charges the same amount for shipping no matter what the customer buys.
- You can set this up so your products are split into groups, and flat rates are applied to each group.
- Example: The Flat Rate Shipping cost for large products is X, for medium products is Y, and for small products in Z. This makes your shipping easier to manage, while allowing you to cover your shipping costs more accurately.
- Flat Rate Shipping makes it much easier to advertise shipping costs upfront.
- Example: If shipping costs are advertised in the website header, customers will know what to expect from the moment they land on your website. If they expect the shipping cost at checkout, there are no surprize costs that cause them to abandon their carts.
- If you use Flat Rate Shipping, advertise it everywhere on your website. Make it impossible for users to miss. You’re offering Flat Rate Shipping so you don’t surprize customers at checkout, so make sure they know about it before they get there.
Use ‘Free Shipping’ over a certain spend amount
- This means that if customers spend over the amount you specify, they don’t pay for shipping.
- ‘Free Shipping’ is an excellent marketing tool. You can also use it to encourage customers to spend more to meet the free shipping threshold amount and claim their free shipping.
Remember: These cost techniques are all about managing your users’ expectations, so you don’t scare them off at checkout. If you’re wondering how you’ll recoup your shipping costs, make sure you incorporate your shipping costs into your product prices.
Are your shipping options or destinations limited?
Do you only deliver to main centres in your country? Or do you only deliver to certain countries but market to all countries? Do you only use a shipping process that some customers might find inconvenient? Example: Your customers may want their products delivered to your door, but you only deliver to the nearest post office.
A lack of shipping options might scare off customers who would otherwise buy from you.
Are your delivery times too long?
Customers want instant gratification. If you can only deliver in a few weeks, but they want their shopping in 3 days, you are going to lose the sale.
If you advertise your product for specific holidays or special events (like Valentine’s Day), but your shipping takes time, you will lose customers. People leave things to the last minute. If they remember a special occasion at the last minute and your website can’t deliver in time, they will go somewhere else.
Do whatever you can to make your delivery times as short as possible.
4. Check your website speed
A slow website can destroy your sales. Users want web pages to display instantly. The longer you keep them waiting for a page to load, the more likely they are to click off your site.
Similarly, if the connection between your website and your payment gateway is too slow, that might also cause them to abandon their purchase.
PRO TIP: Test the payment gateway you have chosen. You have handed your customer to another website so they can make pay you – make sure that website isn’t tanking your sales. The payment gateway website should also be fast, efficient, and live up to your customers’ expectations.
5. Test your checkout process
Many abandoned carts are caused by a cumbersome checkout process. Users might get annoyed at having to create an account before they can buy. Your checkout form might be longer than necessary, or your website might lag on their slow internet connection.
The checkout process is a place for you to gather information about your customer for future use. But ask yourself – how much information do you REALLY need? Is asking for everything you want worth losing a customer over?
Guest checkout or create an account?
Guest checkouts allow users to buy without creating an account. However, if you require users to create an account before buying, is that worth the risk of losing a customer?
Gathering customer data and newsletter subscription permission while customers create accounts might allow you to send email newsletters or follow up emails. But are you willing to sacrifice a sale for that opportunity?
The choice is yours, but if they abandon their cart because they didn’t want to create an account, you probably can’t contact them anyway.
How long is your checkout form?
Look very closely at your checkout form. If you’re selling digital products, do you really need a user’s physical or postal address? Remove as many fields from your checkout form as possible, to make them easy to fill out. Shorter forms always get better results than longer versions.
PRO TIP: Make your checkout process as easy as possible. Amazon was among the first companies to really get this right when they launched their Kindle. You could read a free sample of 10% of the book that inevitably caught your attention. Buying a book took a single click and the book was ready to read. It was so easy and quick, you hardly realised you were even spending money. It was (and still is) the ultimate in checkout simplicity.
Aim to make your website’s user experience that simple. You might need a few more steps, but at least you have a goal worth aiming for!
6. Check your payment options
People use products they know and trust, especially when it comes to spending money. With the explosion of online fraud, users probably have a payment gateway they trust, know how to use, and use regularly. If your website doesn’t use that gateway, they might decide not to trust you and buy somewhere else.
You should be using payment gateways that are well-known by your target market. You should even be using multiple gateways, so you provide for a larger audience’s preferences. Consider adding a budget-friendly option that allows customers to pay over several months. There are payment gateways that offer this service to your customers, without delaying payment to you. Research if this could work in your country and industry, especially if you sell expensive products.
PRO TIP: Advertise your payment options all over your website. This is a key trust indicator and will encourage customers to trust your online shop more.
7. Check additional taxes and/or fees
Customers make a purchase decision on your product page when they click ‘Add to Cart’. This is one of many purchase decisions they’ll make during their shopping, and it’s a critical one. They’ll only buy if the price is right for them. If all they see is a price, with no mention of taxes or additional fees, they’ll rightly assume it’s the full price.
If your ecommerce site adds additional taxes and/or fees during the checkout process, you might surprize your customer. If the extra cost annoys them, or is out of their budget, you’ll lose the sale.
Try to avoid and additional taxes or fees if you can. If you can’t, then make them clearly visible next to the product price, so users know what the final price should be before they ‘Add to Cart’. Surprizes at checkout usually result in customers abandoning their carts, so remove as many surprizes as possible.
8. Does your cart replace a wishlist?
A wishlist is an ecommerce website feature that allows customers to save items that interest them. It’s a collection of products or services that a user wants to remember, that they might buy in future.
If your ecommerce website doesn’t have a wishlist option, users might be adding products to their carts to remember them instead. This could affect the appearance of your stock levels and make your shopping analytics difficult to track.
Add a wishlist feature to your website, with a reminder function, so users don’t have to repurpose your shopping cart. With a wishlist in place, they can save lists of items they might buy later, without affecting your stock or analytics. You can also track wishlist items to gain even more insight into user behavior and their preferences.
There are other reasons users could abandon carts on your ecommerce website.
These might be more difficult to discover and to quantify… Maybe your user got distracted, or their internet connection dropped? Maybe their credit card was overdrawn and they couldn’t checkout? Or maybe they are testing your website to see if they get an incentive email to checkout that contains a discount code?
Use a plugin to manage abandoned carts
There are several plugins to track abandoned carts. Most include options to entice people back to your website so they checkout.
One of the most popular methods is to email a discount code to users who abandoned their carts, a few days after they left your website. There are some limitations around this strategy, like email transmission laws and whether you have the user’s email address, but these remarketing campaigns can be effective.
These plugins can also track your percentage of abandoned carts and whether your remarketing campaign works.
Abandoned carts can be addressed
Buying online is a step-by-step process for any website user. They can opt out of the process at any point, especially if they get confused, are delayed, are surprised by price increases, or question your integrity.
Make sure you plan and test your entire online shopping process thoroughly, with a wide range of users, devices, connections, and personality types, so you can create the best shopping experience possible. By doing this meticulously, you’ll give your shop the best chance of success.
If you have any questions about abandoned carts, please contact us.
