Why Shopping Cart Abandonment Is A Huge Problem for Retailers

Online shoppers are a fickle bunch. In fact, it's estimated up to 77% of online shoppers will abandon their carts at some point during the buying process.

Shopping cart abandonment is costly for retailers because you lose out on potential sales. Let’s go over how merchants of all sizes can fight abandoned carts.

What are abandoned carts and why should retailers care about them?

An abandoned cart is when a shopper adds items to their online shopping cart but then does not complete the purchase. This is damaging to retailers because there are shoppers who were oh-so-close to buying but didn’t.

Your ecommerce business has already done the hard parts of:

Getting this shopper to know you exist
Getting the shopper to visit your online store
Having the shopper interested enough in products to add them to a cart.

… and then have all that hard work go to losing a sale to an abandoned cart.

Why do shoppers abandon carts?

Shoppers abandon carts for a variety of reasons. Research shows that some of the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:

Too many additional fees (shipping & taxes) at checkout
The shopper changed their mind
The shopper may not be ready to purchase and are using your cart as a “wishlist”
The process of completing the checkout is too complex and the shopper gives us.

We’ve all had these experiences when shopping online. Amazon has conditioned many of us to not pay for shipping fees, so any shipping fees makes you consider if you really need this item.

And sometimes, you just get distracted from completing your purchase. You may not have your credit card nearby, your dog may be whining to be taken out or you get a text message that demands your attention.

Just because your shopper abandoned their cart doesn’t mean they’re a lost cause.

Strategies for stopping abandoned carts

Luckily, there are actionable strategies merchants can use to fight off abandoned carts and grow your sales.

SafeOpt: Recover 3-5X More Shoppers Who Abandon Your Website

One of the best ways to recover lost sales is by sending those shoppers messages with incentives to complete the purchase. The challenge is that you often don’t have the contact information for those who abandon carts. But thanks to innovative solutions like SafeOpt, retailers of all sizes can recover more abandoned carts.

With SafeOpt, you simply install a javascript tag on your site. When a potential customer abandons their cart, you’ll be able to email them an incentive to complete that purchase — even if you don’t have their email in your customer database.

SafeOpt is able to do this because it has a network of more than 175 million shoppers who have joined to receive exclusive offers from great brands. It is fully compliant with regulations like CAN-SPAM, CCPA, GDPR and more.

Think of SafeOpt as a new lever to pull to enhance your existing marketing efforts. It’s one that empowers you to send more messages to abandoned shoppers. Try SafeOpt today and see how it can boost your store’s revenue.

Make your shopping experience faster

Did you know that a one-second improvement in site speed can increase your mobile conversions by up to 27%? Your shoppers are growing increasingly impatient, so every microsecond matters.

This makes intuitive sense, too. If you’re interested in buying something and it’s a painful experience to even look at it at the online store, your motivation to buy diminishes. Sometimes, it feels like a burden to actually find the item you like, add it to a cart, fill out all the needed forms and only then can you buy it.

Most of the modern online shopping platforms offer tools or plug-ins to help you increase site speed. Some high-level tips to improve your store’s pagespeed are:

Optimize website code and images: make sure you’re not including extraneous code on your pages and make sure your image file sizes are compressed.
Investigate using a CDN: a content delivery network means your site is delivered through a distributed network of servers, meaning it can deliver your content faster.
Use caching: Caching enables you to store customer data locally, instead of having to constantly access the database. This should improve load time and the overall shopper experience.

Improving your site speed does take time and resources but it’s proven to pay off with increased conversion rates.

Let your shoppers pay any way they want to

Your shoppers may not always have their credit card on them to complete their purchase. This is especially true if they’re shopping on mobile, which is increasingly the case. That’s why offering Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) can help you fight off shopping cart abandonment.

Some APMs to consider adding to your site are:

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options: Services like Klarna and Affirm enable the shopper to pay the purchase cost over time. This could help cost-conscious shoppers complete their purchases. BNPL providers often do come with a merchant fee.
Digital Payments options: This includes services like PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay and more. These often come with a transaction fee.

None of these APMs are free when it comes to costs and resources to implement and manage them. Understand which ones appeal to your customer base the most and start with that one. For example, if you sell high-cost items, a BNPL solution could make sense.

From there, you can use those learnings to see if the conversion lift you see is worth the trouble of bringing on other APMs.

Make shopping cart abandonment a problem of the past

Realistically, you’ll never have zero abandoned carts because life happens. But, if you lean on tools like SafeOpt, make your online store speedier and offer multiple ways for shoppers to pay, shopping cart abandonment won’t be a problem for your online store any more.

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