Shopping cart abandonment is when a customer, after putting products in the shopping cart, leaves the website without completing the purchasing process.
According to a study conducted and published by Baymard Institute, 69.89% is the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate.
Why users abandon a cart without completing the purchasing process?
There are some reasons that lead the user to leave the online store after placing items in the shopping cart.
Before making a list, we have to say that there’s one unavoidable: it’s a natural consequence of how and why users use e-commerce sites.
Users are used to make product and price comparisons, browsing a site for curiosity and not for buying, saving products for later.
Let’s now take a look at the top reasons for cart abandonment and some solutions.
1. Additional hidden costs and fees
At the checkout page, the user finds costs he was not aware of : this usually happens when the shopping cart only displays base price of items and subtotal, without adding the additional charges for tax and shipping.
Solution: avoid, as far as possible, that the total amount increases at the checkout page. Consider the possibility of making any price increase clear since from the beginning.
2. Obligation to create an account
Not all users want to create a user account to buy a product.
Solution: offer the possibility of terminating the purchase with a checkout for guests that does not provide any registration.
3. Long or complex checkout
One of the most common errors is to force the customer to enter redundant informations, too much data or splitting checkout over multiple pages unnecessarily.
Solution: consider to use a single-page checkout and avoid asking too many questions and informations.
4. Website errors or malfunctions
Technical problems decrease the user’s security towards your ecommerce site: pages and products not found, overlapping or unreadable elements, products that can not be added to the cart are are some examples of malfunction.
Solution: regularly test that your online store is stable and fully functional.
5. The Customer doesn’t trust your website
Customers can be fearful of having their information stolen and balk at entering it on a website, especially their credit card informations.
Solution: make use of https secure connection for your web pages (SSL), use your own domain rather than a subdomain, write clear terms and conditions, use verified payment services (Stripe, PayPal, ect) and make these informations clear and visible to users.
6. Delivery too slow
The user expects to receive his purchase as quickly as possible.
Solution: if you can not speed up deliveries, be clear about delivery times from the beginning and allow your customers to track their packages.
7. Return policy not satisfactory or convincing
The return policy is a user’s right and must be easy to find and read by any user.
Solution: have a clear and informative page about your return policy and make it easy to find.
8. Payment method not available
Credit cards is still the most popular payment method for shopping online.
Anyway you can consider to use more available options to speed up your users checkout and make it more comfortable.
Some users can have their money kept on some services (PayPal, Google Pay, etc.): if they do not find these payment methods, they can turn away from your ecommerce site.
Solution: consider to enable Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay and others as your default payment methods.
9. Website not responsive on mobile
Users are increasingly connected via smartphones and tablets.
A site not adapted to the last mobile standards risks not only being excluded from search engines, but above all not being correctly displayed making it difficult, if not impossible, to complete the purchase.
Solution: use a well designed and coded themes for your ecommerce site.
10. Call to Action during checkout
The checkout page should be as simple as possible and without distractions: your goal is to lead the user to finish the purchase.
Solution: use a well designed and simple page, use your upselling and cross-selling strategies at the confirmation of the order, avoid to display the main navigation and all other call to action buttons.
Recover an abandoned cart with Prestashop
In your back-office, you can see the customers who have left items in their cart by choosing the “Shopping Carts” option in the “Orders” dropdown menu. So it’s helpful to keep the cart active until the customer next visits; the customer can then easily find the item selected: he does not have to browse the whole site again.
If a user is already registerd to your site, you can send a first email (within 1-2 hours) as a reminder to invite her/him to complete the order; a second email can be sent after some days or weeks and you can consider to propose a discount code (with a short deadline) to complete the purchase.
Final considerations
An abandoned cart no longer has to mean a lost sale but since cart abandonment has so many causes, it is necessary to have a knowledge of them.
- Analyze and check all the pages and features of your ecommerce site.
- Try to solve all the problems detected.
- Clearly indicate how to contact customer service (telephone number, email address, contact form, chat, etc.) on every page of the site.
- Consider to enable a chat system to support your customers in real time.
- Think about creating a FAQs page to provide answers to common questions.
We are curious to read your opinion!