Card Abandonment is a quotidian and painful problem in e-commerce. In online shopping, people browse the items, shortlist the same and add the choicest items to the cart but sometimes, leave the site without placing the order. This practice of leaving the shopping cart without making a purchase is known as cart abandonment.
Finding the cart abandonment rate of your online shop is an uncomplicated task. The method of calculating the cart abandonment rate is
Dividing the total number of completed purchases by the total number of shopping carts created.
Subtract the result obtained at the above step from 1 and then multiply the answer with 100.
Here, you get the cart abandonment rate.
The cart abandonment rate is a percentage of potential buyers who were with you till they made the cart but left before completing the order process.
Well, the cart abandonment calculation process is presented above just for explanation. Else, you need not get into the calculations as you have Google Analytics to assist you. Like other website-related statistics, you can easily find this figure as well from Google Analytics data.
As highlighted by the Baymard Institute, the average rate of shopping cart abandonment among the results obtained from 41 different studies is 69.57% (September 2019 data). And it is eye-popping!
Shopping cart abandonment rate is a critical factor when it comes to measuring the performance of an online shop. An abandoned cart is a lost sale for you.
Going ahead, a higher cart abandonment rate can be indicative of the service flaws. Please
see, we said, it can be; it is not necessarily a sign of an issue. Because an individual can
abandon the shopping cart because of personal reasons too. Yeah, you got it right! There can be personal reasons like time pass or making a cart for a probable future order.
But what if there is really a problem at service level? Not all people abandoning cart at your site are making cart just because they have some extra time. Hmm…it is a matter of analysis. To get an answer, you can make use of different metrics.
Here comes into picture another factor is known as checkout abandonment rate. It is the percentage of people leaving an online store after initiating the checkout process but without making a purchase.
Though checkout abandonment rate is different from the cart abandonment rate if seen precisely, in a broader sense, it forms part of the cart abandonment rate.
How?
It can help you understand whether the shopping cart abandonment rate is associated with service flaws or not. Because a person can make cart and leave as a time pass but person initiating checkout process just as a time pass is less likely to happen. Well, finding out the exact reasons that lead to cart abandonment is a different topic, demanding comprehensive
research. That’s not our point of concern for now. Today, we are here to discuss that if your cart abandonment rate comes out to be more than the normal, what you can do to address the issue. Or what are the ways to keep your cart abandonment rate low?
Okay, your potential buyer has reached to the cart. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to come back and shop more. For this, you need to see that your online store has comfortable navigation. Allow them to come back to the store from the cart and browse more without losing the existing shopping cart. It is a great way to enhance conversion. In the absence of
proper navigation and facility to move back and forth, there is a high chance that visitors bounce back in between the process.
A higher page load time during the checkout or payment process is, undoubtedly, a sales killer. A slow loading time is not only wastage of time but a source of poor customer experience too, and many people just don’t like that. Imagine how bad it feels that you want to order your favourite items but the page is taking too long to load; excitement has gone!
That what happens and people leave the cart.
Keep the checkout forms simple, with a minimum possible number of fields. Moreover, allow your potential customer to checkout as a guest, because not everyone is interested in making a profile on your online store and forcing them for the same can drive them away. A complicated process is a huge turnoff when it comes to online shopping.
If you want to captivate and catch a higher number of people, that too, of diverse type, then offering varied payment options is a necessity. Just continuing with COD, credit card, debit card, and internet banking is not enough nowadays when they have easier and innovative payment options like Google Pay, etc., allowing the customers to make payments in only a
few clicks.
Don’t let the customers use security concerns as an excuse for cart abandonment. Make sure that your store and checkout process is completely secure and free of unwanted issues. And make sure to inform about the same to the would-be buyers so they can trust you. Allow them
to be confident of their decision to proceed with you.
28% of buyers abandon the shopping cart if they come across unexpected shipping charges (neilpatel.com). The number is high! Yeah, misinformation about shipping charges is the major reason for cart abandonment. Thus, it is better to be clear about the shipping and other added costs from the starting to let the people make informed decisions.
At last, manage your online reputation in a way that influences your potential buyers.
Get hold of slipping customers. The above-listed ways can enable you to tackle the rejections and allow you to generate more ROI. Integrate them to your e-commerce strategy and rock the show.
There can be more reasons for cart abandonment and multiple ways to lower the same.
Are you facing this issue? Let’s Do a Quick Diagnosis of your E-Commerce Website!
