How To Return Customers Who Have Abandoned Their Carts

Cart abandonment is easy to estimate. It’s just one minus the total of the number of customers who’ve made a purchase divided by the number of customers who’ve added products to their carts.

It’s not the only way to calculate the rate, so you don’t have to do it manually unless you love maths. Google Analytics also provides users with the opportunity to reveal the cart abandonment rate on their websites.

Log in to the service and go to the “Shopping Behavior” tab. It will show you how many sessions ended up with transactions and how many users quit an online store on different stages. With these stats, you will be able to find out drawbacks in your site’s design and fix them.

Consumers frequently use baskets as wish lists. They add items, compare them, and buy from another store if they find the cost or the shipping method more appropriate. Some people just browse the Internet without the intention to buy. As the Baymard Institute has discovered, the last group consists of almost 60% of US online shoppers. These people often abandon their carts before checkout.

The rest 40% have other reasons. The following chart presents the reasons why US consumers refuse purchasing after visiting online stores.

Baymard Institute

As you can see, 53% of shoppers quit when they see too high additional costs. 31% don’t like creating accounts, 23% are afraid of sophisticated checkout process, 20% abandon carts when they can’t totalize the final cost. Also, pay attention to the 15% of users who refuse to purchase because of website errors and 6% who can’t find an appropriate payment method. All of these issues can be easily solved if you find the problem.

Visit your website as a user, make a journey of your customer, select several products, drop them in a cart, compare, proceed to checkout, and try to buy them. Probably, you will come across some frictions, weak points, inconvenience. For example, you may find out that the shopping cart doesn’t save selected items. Fix this issue!

When you implement improvements, don’t forget to make an A/B testing to ensure they are effective.

Let’s take a closer look at the issues that cause cart abandonment. Having solved them, you’ll immediately get an increase in payments since 40% of customers would not leave your website without a transaction.

Online Store Isn’t Mobile Optimized

Did you know that eCommerce mobile visits count almost 60%? It requires merchants to have dynamic websites that adapt to a variety of screens. Take into account that the mobile version of the online store has to be clear and user-friendly. Place necessary fields and call to action button so as a customer can easily find them.

It is how Disney’s website looks on different screens.

Overwhelmed Checkout

Avoid complicated checkout process with a bunch of required fields, many steps, etc. Your task is to make the ordering process as quick as possible. To achieve that, decrease checkout steps to a minimum, implement an autocomplete feature, allow buying without signing up, and so on.

Little changes to checkout also may help you to increase sales. As it has been revealed, adding a functionality that collapses coupon field boosts conversions up to 8%, and deleting distractions from cart header makes a 6% lift in sales. But wait there is more! If you add a checkoutless feature that decreases the required number of clicks from 80 to 2, you can gain even more. According to PayPal, adding their quick check out button bumps up revenue by up to 34%.

Unclear Return Policy

One of the most crucial goals for online store owners is to build customer trust. The thing is that people don’t have an opportunity to see the product with their own eyes, touch it, interact with it, etc. In the case of a brick and mortar store, this isn’t a big deal, but it turns out to be almost the most critical work for the merchants who sell online.

Refund terms are aimed at customer trust establishing. If you have a page with all the details thoroughly listed, it significantly increases the chances that a user will buy from you because they see that they can get their money back in case they don’t like something. Pay special attention to compiling return policy. Outline it on a cart page in addition to the whole list represented in a footer.

Cart Works Incorrectly

It happens that functionality breaks, and in the case of an online store, it may dramatically influence revenue. Make sure that your shopping cart saves items, allows proceeding to checkout, and all the buttons work as expected. A single bug in a code may cause terrible results. Users will not strive to purchase if a basket doesn’t keep added products. Go to your website and try to buy something. It is how you will find out if some features break.

It could seem that if a customer doesn’t make a purchase eventually, he will not come back, but it’s not so. Almost 90% of users who abandoned their carts say that they may consider finishing a purchase. Many of them haven’t decided yet. Others were interrupted while they were filling the order fields. All of them may return if you remind them about the unfinished purchase. There are three ways marketers use widely to return such prospects.

Email Reminder

Don’t underestimate emails. They are still a robust digital marketing instrument despite many other communication channels. You can just set up sending automated reminders in case of cart abandonment. A user will check inbox and finish a purchase later. Magento 2 provides such functionality out of the box, so you will not need to search and install any extensions or 3rd-party services.

Look at the reminder Bliss sends. It offers a 30% discount and convinces a user to finish a purchase before the products are “gone for good”.

According to SaleCycle, 40% or sent emails are viewed, and 28% of them return customers to the site.

Remarketing

If you don’t have a user’s email, you can try to catch up with them using remarketing settings. The data left on a shopping cart is enough to create automated ads that will show fly-aways while searching the web. To increase the chances of getting the customer back, offer them a free shipping or special discount. Also, you can notify the user that the product they were looking for is almost out of stock. This psychological trick may impact a person’s decision and bring you a customer back.

Web Push Notifications

It is an entirely new method to re-engage consumers. When you turn it on, users who left your store without a purchase get push notifications from a browser while surfing the web. To enable this technique, you even don’t need your website to be opened. These notifications pop up anywhere on the Internet.

Convince people to buy with the help of special offers. It’s hard to resist completing a purchase when you are offered to get the item with a 15% discount, isn’t it?

If you have a high abandonment rate, don’t fall into despair! Probably, you have to start using the marketing instruments to return customers. If the problem hides on a website, feel free to contact us, and we will help you to solve it.