According to various online studies, eCommerce stores experience up to 77% cart abandonment rates. On average, Baymard Institute reports that shopping cart abandonment rates remain at least 69.89% worldwide – irrespective of what an online store sells. If you take numbers into account, that’s a whole lot of people reaching your website and leaving without making a purchase. To make things worse, these people went to your website through all the campaigns you have been investing in.
Here’s why most online stores experience high shopping cart abandonment rates, the reasons why it happens, and hacks you can use to reduce the number of people who leave products behind.
Why do online stores experience high shopping cart abandonment rates?
Customers tend to add products they like to their carts and leave without making a purchase most of the time. Irrespective of the deal an online store is running, they’re willing to risk exploring other options available to them. Here are the primary reasons why your store experiences high shopping cart abandonment rates too:
- They were browsing through products and didn’t want to make a purchase
- They were forced to sign up on your website to complete a purchase and didn’t see a guest checkout option
- They found the shipping costs to be too expensive
- They felt that the checkout process was too lengthy and overwhelming
- They were skeptical about transacting on your platform (security concerns)
- They did not see their preferred payment mode
- They did not find their preferred shipping method
- They felt that the overall website experience was not good
- They found a better deal for the same product on a different site
Considering each of the reasons above, you’ll know that they are the basics that even you would expect from an online store.
When was the last time you made an extra effort to purchase from a store that didn’t offer you a great website experience? Or you managed zooming in and out of product images on mobile to get a better perspective and make the purchase?
It’s just inconvenient. Therefore, in most cases, the lack of a fantastic shopping experience – from browsing to finding the correct shipping and payment modes- causes high cart abandonment rates.
How can you reduce your cart abandonment rate?
If we had to put it in one sentence simply, the answer or solution here would be to improve your online store’s customer experience. The better their online shopping experience is, the cart abandonment rate is less.
A few ways to ensure that your online store visitors don’t just add items to their cart and leave without making a purchase include:
- Simplifying your navigation so that they can find products easily
- Creating compelling product descriptions with visuals (view guide here)
- Improve your cart visibility so that the visitor is constantly reminded of items being there
- Provide a guest checkout option for those who don’t want to sign up for your store
- Optimize your checkout process and make it faster to complete
- Reduce price shock by ensuring the shipping costs are upfront
- Win trust by adding security certificates on all your online store pages
- Implement an exit intent overlay to re-capture a visitor’s attention before they leave
- Analyze and offer the preferred shipping methods
- Analyze and provide the preferred payment modes
- Create a mobile app to make it easier for your customers to shop (get started here)
- Implement push notifications that remind the customers of the items left behind
- Automate cart recovery campaigns to let customers know what they might be missing out on
- Use re-marketing and retargeting to remind the customers of the products added to their abandoned cart
- Leverage scarcity or offer time-bound discounts to nudge visitors to purchase their first visit itself
- Offer free shipping or competitive discounts wherever possible
Every online store has different challenges when it comes to acquiring more customers and generating more sales every month. That’s why you must consistently track how visitors interact with your online store and how your mobile users engage with your store’s app. How you optimize your online store and mobile app using this data helps you reduce your cart abandonment rate.
Confused or would like to discuss tactics that can help you with high cart abandonment rates?
Get in touch with our Shopify experts today!
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