Shopping cart abandonment is one of the most relevant issues online retailers face. Every year, $18 billion get stuck in abandoned carts. According to Baymard Institution, the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 69.5%, meaning roughly 7 out of 10 shoppers won’t complete the transaction. These numbers indicate that cart abandonment is a top priority for online shops to work on and try to avoid since it is inevitable.
Before getting into the reasons for Cart Abandonment and how you can reduce it, let’s start with the definition and how you can calculate this rate for your business.
What is Shopping Cart Abandonment and how can you calculate your rate?
Online shopping cart abandonment is the act of a prospective customer adding items to a shopping cart but not completing the transaction. To evaluate the cart abandonment rate of your shop, you should follow this formula: 1- (total number of completed transactions/total number of carts filled) x 100.
Before you make changes to your website, first assess the cart abandonment rate your shop is experiencing and then look for reasons and ways to improve it.
What are the main reasons for Cart Abandonment?
Users are complex, and cart abandonment cannot be entirely avoided. There will always be people who do not complete the transaction. However, most reasons for cart abandonment are the same for many shoppers, as they have similar buying habits and preferences.
According to Baymard Institution, the main three reasons for cart abandonment are:
1) Extra costs are too high (shipping, tax, fees)
2) Asking to create an account for checkout
3)Delivery is too slow.
Most of these reasons have to do with a lack of research on their target market, an understanding of the user experience, and a failure to test their website’s performance or the usability of the shopping cart by users rather than just employees.
How can you reduce cart abandonment?
Here are the top 5 actions to reduce cart abandonment
- Be transparent about all extra fees
Be upfront with your customers about all the fees incurred, including shipping, taxes & duties. This would decrease the chances of cart abandonment and help you build trust that can later be converted into repurchases.
Suppose your business encounters high shipping costs and unclear information on tax and duties. In that case, you should look for a cross-border solution that can provide you and your customers with a smooth shipping experience. BorderGuru is a suitable option for you, as we offer competitive shipping costs and calculate taxes & duties fees, displaying fee information clearly at checkout. This helps to be transparent and expedite delivery, as all items are custom cleared.
2. Offer different checkout options
This is a crucial feature that can significantly impact whether a potential customer completes the transaction. Buyers do not like long checkout processes and the need to create an account to make a purchase. Asking a user to create an account before checkout can put potential buyers off and miss out on sales.
To lower the chances of missing potential sales, offer different checkout options, for example, Member Checkout, Guest Checkout, and PayPal Checkout. This could give your business a better chance of attracting buyers to complete the transaction. The faster and easier the checkout process is for them, the lower the chances of cart abandonment.
3. Offer various payment options
It is essential to be aware of and recognize the most common payment options used by your target visitors. Offering only the options, you are used to is not enough as several payment methods have become popular such as digital wallets and payment platforms such as Shop Pay and PayPal.
The advice is to research the most commonly used payment methods by your target visitor or the countries you are selling to. For example, in Europe, paying with Apple Pay, Google Wallet, PayPal, or bank transfer is very common. Therefore, it is a matter of finding out what your visitors use for online payments and offering them to reduce cart abandonment.
4. Optimize your website’s loading speed
There’s nothing more frustrating for a user than a page taking too long to load. Site speed can often be overlooked, but it can significantly impact the user’s experience of your website. If your website takes more than two seconds to load, it increases the possibility of the shopper looking elsewhere. If your page takes four to eight seconds to load, you can lose most of your visitors. In current times, where users are used to everything being fast, they do not have the patience to wait for a website to load.
Three tips for speeding up your website
- Make sure your designs (images, videos, etc.) are optimized to avoid slowing down your website.
- Check your site’s speed on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Establish an ongoing page load testing process to keep the loading speed minimum.
5- Communicate with shoppers who abandoned your website’s shopping cart
Some shoppers need more time to decide on purchasing an item. Do not get discouraged when users abandon shopping carts. Since users are already interested in your products, it is time before they commit to buying. This means it is important to have a strategy to get their attention back to your website to get them to complete their transaction finally.
There are two strategies to communicate with shoppers who left an uncompleted transaction:
- Personalized follow-up emails: This means sending them a reminder of the items they left behind and offering them a discount to get their attention and incentivize them to purchase the items. 54% of shoppers will return to the website to complete the transaction if the items left in the shopping cart have a discount.
- Show retargeting ads for the products left behind by shoppers. This will remind them of your products and your website. You can also run a special ad with a discount price for the item they are interested in. The aim is to attract them back to your website, increasing the chances of making a purchase.
The most common reasons for cart abandonment are related to website and shopping cart user experience and extra costs like shipping and, taxes & duties. Brands should keep their customers’ preferences in mind to avoid these issues, it is essential to consider them when making decisions about your business and products to avoid losing potential sales. BorderGuru offers you a hassle-free international shipping service and a pleasant experience for your customers at checkout. We make international shipping as seamless as domestic shipping.
Contact Us Now to reduce your abandoned carts!