The Secret to Curbing Your Abandoned Cart Rate

Abandoned carts represent an enormous stash of potential sales, but unlocking that vault will require some prying, dedication, and likely a few changes to your checkout, policies, and possibly even your marketing tactics. But before you embark on this mission, it’s necessary to find out where you’re actually losing customers and then you can make a plan of attack to address your abandoned cart rate.

Abandoned Cart Rate Explained

An abandoned cart happens any time a visitor comes to your site, puts an item in their cart, and leaves without completing checkout. Every ecommerce business has an abandoned cart rate, and the average is around 68 percent. Yikes! Not to worry though, you can fix this and it’s important for your business to take action now.

So What’s the Big Secret?

Sorry to say that there’s no magic pill to fix everything because the secret to lowering your abandoned cart rate is insight and testing. To decrease your abandoned carts, you have to figure out what’s causing customers to leave the checkout prematurely, which you can do with analytics. To help you out with that, let’s look at some of the most common explanations for abandoned carts:

• Shipping costs
• Shipping timeframe
• No guest checkout
• Not enough payment options
• Customer is not ready to buy
• Distraction
• Final cost
• Long or complicated checkout process

Addressing the Most Common Problems

Make it simple: Before Amazon perfected their checkout process, they forced customers to register during checkout. But they soon realized this led to a huge abandoned cart rate. Amazon’s simple and effective solution was this: make the checkout process easier and allow customers to checkout as guests. You can do the same by reducing the number of steps, clicks, and hoops that customers have to jump through, not making them register, and installing progress indicators on the checkout pages.

Change shipping rates and policies: High shipping prices are a very common reason for abandoned carts. Your solutions include free shipping across the board, free shipping thresholds, or lower shipping rates. It’s also important to have clear and visible shipping rates and policies on your website, so there are no surprises during checkout.

Provide multiple payment options: Mobile purchasing is expected to account for nearly 50 percent of all online purchases in the next few years, and you can make it easier for mobile customers to navigate your checkout simply by offering more convenient payment methods, such as PayPal and Amazon Payments.

Retargeting abandoners: With abandoners, the hard part is over—you already got them to your site once, and getting them back is much easier. But the trick here is to use the right tactic because it’s integral to customize your marketing based on an abandoner’s interests. Two of the most effective strategies for retargeting are online advertising and email marketing. Psst – thought you should know Vantage offers a pretty amazing custom abandoned cart audience that allows you to seamlessly retarget customers on Facebook and Instagram and bring them back to your store. 

Saving cart options: Allowing customers to save their carts can address multiple reasons for abandoned carts, including distraction and customers who weren’t ready to buy. If customers leave your site for whatever reason without checking out but then come back to find their cart intact, they’ll be more likely to complete the checkout the second time around.

You can’t curb your abandoned cart rate without knowing when and why customers are leaving, so knowledge really is the secret to curbing your abandoned cart rate. Once you figure out where customers are leaving the online sales funnel, you can take steps to address the problems. Just make sure you track your abandoned cart rate on an ongoing basis, record the changes you make, and note how each change impacts your rate and sales.