As an online store owner, nothing is worse than seeing hard-earned traffic lost as cart abandonment.
But why do customers leave?
Here are 5 reasons why shoppers could be abandoning carts in your online store. Keep an eye out for these reasons, you could be committing these eCommerce sins without knowledge.
- Undeclared shipping costs
- Limited Product Information
- A messy checkout page
- Minimum order threshold
- Delivery takes too long
But still, there is a way to bring customers back and recoup your lost revenue – abandoned cart email.
In this blog, Let’s see each of these online-shopper-turn-offs in detail now.
Undeclared Shipping Costs
Joe is looking to buy a daily running shoe and finds something he likes in an online store. The shoe makes, color, size, price, and everything matches his preferences.
To Joe’s surprise, he finds an additional $20 added to the product price when he reaches the checkout page where the payment happens.
This undeclared shipping cost will definitely make Joe rethink his decision to buy the shoe he spent so long searching, researching, and fixing as a final choice. If Joe decides not to pay that additional ‘undeclared’ $20, he will simply abandon the shopping cart. Even worse, he might check for the same shoe and move on to a competitor store.
Limited Product Information
Online shopping has some inherent drawbacks. The biggest disadvantage is that your customers cannot touch and feel the product before buying it.
The best they can get is some multi-angle images, a product video, and written content that explains the product in detail. So, when either one of these is unavailable, it gets the customer thinking:
- Is the product really what it is shown as?
- Will the measurement or specs be proper?
- What if the quality is not worth the price?
These questions might force them not to buy the product at all.
Shortfarm’s Product Information Report asserts these facts in numbers. At least 26% of customers abandon shopping carts if product images are not available. An estimated 30% will abandon for lack of product content.
The bottom line: Detailed product information is one of the key ingredients to reducing shopping cart abandonment.
A Messy Checkout Page
Create your Abandoned Cart Series in a Snap
Be it at a brick-and-mortar store or in an online store, nobody like waiting. Things should move fast and should be done in the whisk of a second. That said, the checkout page is one place where most customers drop off.
Why? Four major reasons can be blamed:
- They are asked for too much unnecessary information
- The checkout process takes a long time to complete
- The payment page does not load properly
- The desired payment mode is not available
With these reasons in mind, the checkout process should be optimized for maximum conversion. Don’t give any reason for customers to abandon their cart. Optimize the checkout process, preferably using a single page, to improve the overall conversion rate.
AO aces at providing a seamless checkout process with its minimal yet comprehensive checkout page:
Minimum Order Threshold
A minimum order threshold demands that your online shoppers have a minimum cart value amount to be eligible for free shipping or additional discounts. While a minimum order threshold helps balance the scale regarding costs and profitability, a high minimum limit can backfire.
Guest shoppers and customers who are looking to pick up just one product might be intimidated by the minimum order limit. They will have to skip the frequent smaller purchases to save shipping costs. Sometimes, if put together, these abandoned smaller purchases can give your business much more sales volume than those achieved with the help of a minimum order threshold.
Setting a minimum order threshold is a challenge. The ceiling limit which might fit one store may not fit another. It varies according to the product range, the customer segment, their spending habits, and overall industry sentiment. Play the minimum order threshold to your benefit for maximum conversions and reduced cart abandonment.
Delivery Takes Too Long
The low price benefit may not make your customers more patient. Despite the ground-low prices, they would still expect the delivery span to be at a bare minimum.
eCommerce trends suggest that there is an increasing shift towards same-day delivery or omnichannel shopping, where customers get their products as early as on the same day for no extra cost.
The moral of the story is customers are impatient to have their products delivered. They are even ready to pay for a quicker delivery but are not willing to wait longer. Long delivery periods are often shunned since omnichannel retailers make it possible for them to buy the product instantly through their brick-and-mortar stores.
Improve your Abandoned Cart recovery with 30+ Customizable templates
The Art Of Retargeting: How To Win Back Customers Who Abandoned Shopping Carts
Retargeting ads is a surefire way to win customers who abandoned their shopping carts earlier. Thanks to Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, and several other tools for email retargeting, it is now possible to turn abandoned shoppers into paying customers.
Several success stories, including those like envelopes.com, show that email retargeting campaigns can drastically reduce cart abandonment by up to 40%.
Abandoned cart email campaigns can be used in two ways, involving personal information and the customer’s past browsing/shopping habits.
- Shipping concession: Offer them free shipping or a coupon code that saves them from expensive shipping costs.
- Discounts: A personal deal that offers a discount is the easiest way to retarget and win back customers. Discounts work irrespective of the reason why the customer abandoned the cart.
To make the retargeting campaign more effective, split it into several stages, each with its associated targets and unique abandoned cart email templates. Here is an example of how multi-stage retargeting works:
Small changes to your online store’s customer pathways combined with retargeting can help bring down the cart abandonment rate to a bare minimum. While cart abandonment cannot be eliminated completely, the lion’s share of it can be prevented by diagnosing the reasons and taking remedial action.
Suffering from high shopping cart abandonment? TargetBay’s unique shopping cart abandonment solution can help recover over 70% of your sales.
