Home Articles How To Fight Cart Abandonment and Get Lost Sales Back

How To Fight Cart Abandonment and Get Lost Sales Back

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Every eCommerce online store is losing money every day. This is true because the data supports it. This is not an actual loss of money but the potential revenue you are losing or the opportunity cost of not worrying about abandoned customers.

According to Baymard Institute, 69.57% online shopping carts are abandoned every day. The average is 69.7& on Desktop computers, 85.65% on Mobile and 80.74% on Tablets. There are several reasons such as the location of your customers, Black Friday sales, the kind of industry that you are dealing with and many others.

Cart abandonment is the biggest pain point of entrepreneurs and we are here to explain some reasons and eCommerce solutions to combat these lost sales.

Reasons For Cart Abandonment

1. Cost Is Too Much

According to Statista the most effective incentive for online shoppers is free delivery, followed by coupons and discounts on the second leading position. Costs play a huge role in the decision-making of whether a customer wants to buy your product or not. This is not the original cost but anything additional such as taxes, delivery charges or service fees which aren’t made obvious while adding to the cart. 

2. Sign-up Is Required

Most customers who are shopping online are in a hurry and they want a frictionless experience. It’s a turn-off when they are being asked to make an account and on top of that when the website asks you for your birthday, etc., that just completely ruins the experience. Offering a guest checkout option can be enough to solve this problem.

3. Check-out Process Is Too Long

18% of shopping carts are abandoned because of a long check-out process. The quest of businesses for information to understand their customers can often lead to losing them as well. Luckily, one-click options such as Alipay, shoppay, or other digital wallets can resolve this issue pretty smoothly.

4. Untrusted Site

In 2020, about a 1.4million people were victims of identity theft in the US alone. The people reported that this data was taken out of information submitted for check out. It’s no surprise that people don’t trust websites with their credit card information after this. This can be combated with SSL certificates, testimonials from customers and warranties, etc.

How To Get Your Lost Sales Back?

1. Using A Trustworthy Ecommerce Platform

Sales may be lost at the checkout page but to get them back we have to revisit the entire user journey through our website. The success of a great user experience is rooted in choosing a great eCommerce platform. The reason being that eCommerce platforms usually have responsive designs. The biggest rate of cart abandonment was on mobiles and tablets, having a responsive design on these devices can save you a lot of customers.

Moreover, if your website is responsive it loads quickly and the customer doesn’t have to wait. It is vital to deliver a smooth mobile experience. One other recommendation would be to add plugins to your website such as Keepcart. It remembers the items put in by the consumer in their cart when they visited your website the last time. 

2. Alternative Modes Of Payment

The days of entering your entire credit card details are gone with the wind. There are many other payment gateways that should be connected to your website. This not only makes it easy for you to cover more customers but also gives customers the ease of paying using any method.

Other options can include digital wallets such Alipay, PayPal or installment options of Klarna and after pay, etc. According to an article by retaildrive 215% of growth is anticipated in buy now pay later in installments trend in 2021.

3. Free/Discounted Delivery

As we discussed before, delivery charges are the biggest culprit when it comes to abandoned carts. It’s hard for new businesses to compete with the free and same-day delivery of Amazon but they can add certain incentives to make the customer want to wait an extra day. We would recommend offering free delivery and averaging the cost of delivery inside the retail price of the product. Other methods would include offering cheap material to cover the package mid-checkout, offer free local delivery or pick-up options as well. 

4. Return Policies

Shoppers are almost always concerned about whether they would be able to return a certain item if they don’t like it, etc. Around 1 in 10 carts are abandoned due to the website’s shady or not-so-satisfying return policies. This sounds counterintuitive as online businesses are already plagued by abandoned carts but the truth is if you showcase your return policy mid checkout, maybe explain it with a little graphics as a no-risk, 100% refund chances are people will buy more. One example of this is Bear Mattress, they highlight their 100-night trial and 100% refund policy mid check out to reduce cart abandonment.

Online shopping is definitely different from in-person advertising and reaching out to the customer. The good news is that these reasons for cart abandonment are preventable if not completely reduced. 

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