Scroll to get rid of the most annoying eCommerce issue

For the less savvy, cart abandonment is the action of a visitor leaving an ecommerce website without making a purchase, although they initiated the checkout process.

Cart abandonment rate is a metric calculated as the ratio between the number of people that complete the purchase and those that don’t.

According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 67.91% but depending on the vertical, it can vary between 60% and 80%.

Overall, cart abandonments account for a total amount of $18 billion loss in potential revenue/year for eCommerce companies. 

An estimated 22% of all retailers do not know their abandoned cart rate. 

Within 3 and a half hours of abandoning the checkout process, 75% of the users still have buying intention.

Average cart abandonment rate

People leave ecommerce websites without completing the checkout process for a variety of reasons, but some of the most common are:

Reports and stats source

An old adage says “every problem contains in itself the seeds of the solution”. So we’ve found the best solutions for reducing cart abandonment in the causes that make people leave their carts before completing the checkout process.

If you’ll address these most common customer objections you’ll surely decrease your cart abandonment rate. Here’s what you can do to for each of them.

Problem: "Extra costs are too high"

Solution: Clearly state any extra costs before reaching the checkout page. 

Ideally, provide free shipping above a certain amount and include any taxes in the product price itself. 

This will give the customers a full picture when they decide to make a purchase.

Problem: "The site required creating an account"

Solution: Allow people to submit orders as guests. Forcing them to signup for an account before being able to buy would only deter them to complete the order. Users get really annoyed when they are forced to do certain actions. 

Problem: "The checkout process is too complicated/long"

Solution: Make sure to eliminate any requirements that are not necessary for completing the checkout.

• Reduce the number of form fields
• Delete links that point to other pages of the website (think navigation menu & footer links)
• Have a clear progress bar in place
• Make the form interactive so that you provide instant gratification to the visitors, etc. 
  

Problem: "Website has errors/crashes"

Solution: Thoroughly test your website on all browsers and on all devices. Furthermore, pay attention to your website loading speed, anything slower than 2-3 seconds will dramatically affect the cart abandonment rate. 

Problem: "I did not trust the website with my credit card information"

Solution: Add trust elements to the cart such as 3rd party logos (the banks that you accept payment for, accreditations, etc), customer reviews & testimonials, product quality and delivery guarantees. All of these help to increase the way your website it's perceived by your customers. 

Problem: "Delivery was too slow"

Solution: In the era of instant gratification, you need to deliver fast otherwise you’re fighting a losing battle.

• Clearly state your delivery policy, add testimonials regarding your services + maybe you can create a "warranty" for delayed orders
• Implement fast shipping options such as next day shipping, even if the cost is high...some customers prefer to pay more in order to receive their products faster.
  

Problem: "Return policy wasn’t satisfactory"

Solution: Being able to return products is a key factor when shopping online. This is very important especially for products that come in different sizes such as clothes. 

So do your best to implement a hassle-free return policy.

If you can’t do anything about it you can at least run surveys & state how many satisfied customers found your products match their expectations 100%:

 “95% happy customers or 347 customers said the products were exactly how they’ve expected.”

Problem: "There weren’t enough payment methods"

Solution: Before starting to add a ton of new payment methods that you think are interesting, run another survey and find out which payment gateways you should implement.

But how can you implement all these changes and make sure they have the desired effect?

Well the answer is simple: A/B testing. Each time you make one or more changes in the layout of your checkout page, create an A/B test and measure the effect of the new layout head to head with the original page. 

Ongoing implementation of A/B testing will result in cart abandonment rate reductions by as much as 20%. 

Besides A/B testing you can add some other weapons in your arsenal such as cart recovery emails. 

They work wonders for people that already have an account on your website. If this is the case, and they end up leaving without completing the purchase, you can make use of cart abandonment software and send them email reminders at time intervals of your choosing. 

As a general rule, aim to have your first reminder email sent within the first hour after they left the site. Because that's when you have the greatest chances of convincing them to change their mind. But 24h and 3 days emails also work, especially as followups. 

According to Soundest.com, cart recovery emails have a much bigger revenue per sent email: birthday emails earn $0.07/email, welcome emails $0.18/email while abandoned cart emails generate a whopping $5.64/email. Overall, cart recovery emails can decrease the abandonment rate by as much as 15%.

Another secret weapon you have at your disposal, and which few companies use, is real time objection treatment surveys. They work wonders because there’s no better time to address the customer's concerns as when they’re on the cart page itself. 

These kind of surveys work on the principle of branching logic (aka skip logic) and engage the users on conversations that are meaningful for their exact contexts. The surveys only display when the customer has the intention of abandoning the shopping cart by leaving the active area of the browser. 

Imagine being able to have the following dialogues with abandoning users:

First of all, when you implement any solution to reduce cart abandonment you’re making a first step towards a higher conversion rate and increased revenue for your business. 

But, if you implement two or more of these solutions you’ll benefit from the stacking effect and you’ll get even higher conversion rates. 

Here’s why. 

Let’s assume each of these solutions - A/B testing, cart recovery emails & objection treatment surveys - can reduce cart abandonment with about 15% on their own. Now let’s see what would happen if we use them on a business with 80% cart abandonment rate, that sells $1 million in goods/year. Before using cart recovery solutions they lose up to $4 millions/year, which is huge.

Scenario #1: Implement any single solution and the 80% cart abandonment rate will be reduced to about 64%. 

Scenario #2: Implement all of them and the rate can drop as low as 50%. In terms of cash this would translate into 1.6 millions/year in extra orders, practically increasing the overall revenue by more than 2.5X.

By implementing Omniconvert you can instantly cover ⅔ of your needs for a good cart abandonment strategy. Install just one snippet of code in under 5 minutes and you’ll be able to run A/B tests, implement objection treatment surveys and more! 

Omiconvert is fully compatible with the most popular eCommerce solutions such as Magento, Shopify, Opencart, Bigcommerce or Volusion and it integrates with marketing software such as Google Analytics, Zapier, Mailchimp and more. 

“What I like best is that this product does more than just A/B test. Qualitative data is crucial, and the tool helps you gather this vital information. I also like the personalization aspect of the technology.”

Justin Rondeau

Director of Optimization at Digital Marketer

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