How to Reduce Abandoned Cart in Online Business (9 Steps)

As a business owner, what do you hate most? Of course, people do not purchase your product after visiting your store, right? But you get more frustrated when customers add your products to the cart but abandon them midway. This is what we call cart abandonment.

It not just happens to eCommerce products but also in the case of themes, plugins, and digital products. But customers abandoning their cart doesn’t mean your relationship with them is over. You must revamp your web design and checkout process to bring them back again and reduce the abandonment rate.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss several actionable ways how to reduce abandoned carts in online businesses.

• Reasons Behind Online Shopping Cart Abandonment
• How to Reduce Abandoned Cart in Online Business
• Things to Cover in Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

Let’s start with why customers abandon carts.

Reasons Behind Online Shopping Cart Abandonment

According to a report from Statista, the average cart abandonment falls just below 70%. Only one-third of them return to buy the product, and most of the rest get the product from a competitor. Why customers abandon products in the cart is a common question that hits most people’s minds.

By researching this topic, Baymard Institutes has obtained several insights, which are presented statistically below.

• Excessive cost (shipping, tax, fees) – 48%
• Mandatory account creation – 24%
• Slow delivery – 22%
• Not trusting the site with credit card information – 18%
• Complex checkout process – 17%
• Unclear total order cost upfront – 16%
• Website error/crashed – 13%
• No satisfying return policy – 12%
• Insufficient payment methods – 9%
• Credit card(s) declined – 4%

Baymard Institutes explains that a significant portion of the abandoned cart is recoverable if necessary actions are taken with the right strategy. Keep reading this post to the end to explore them.

How to Reduce Abandoned Cart in Online Business

Cart abandonment is a real thing. But most business owners don’t realize it. They put in all their efforts to make the store look pretty so the customers get a nice vibe. However, all your labor becomes a waste if you fail to generate sales.

You’ve seen several statistics above on why customers abandon carts. Now, we’ll discuss several actionable steps for reducing abandoned carts in online businesses. Get started.

1. Include Fast Shipping Options

Fast shipping often charges additional fees, which makes the overall product purchasing cost too high, leading customers to abandon the cart. Still, when customers urgently need a product, they are ready to pay the additional cost. 

This is why you must include at least one express shipping option, including several other low cost shipping options. This can help you cover all types of customers, reducing the chances of abandonment rates. You must clearly showcase the shipping options on the checkout page.

2. Add a Guest Checkout Option

Shoppers often prefer not to share personal information unless it’s necessary. This is why most of them love to avoid those online shops where creating an account is a must. When people decide to buy something, they want the process to be as painless as possible.

Besides, creating an account might appear to be a painful experience, which is why many will prefer not to proceed but abandon the product in the cart.

The guest checkout option allows users to complete the checkout process without having to create an account. So, you must have a guest checkout option on your site.

3. Painless Checkout Process

A painless checkout process allows customers to complete their purchases quickly as easily as possible with minimal obstacles. It should cover a simple interface and an easy step-by-step navigation that guides people from the shipping cart to purchase completion.

To simplify the checkout process, you must first reduce the number of required fields and steps. Integrating the autofill feature for address and payment information can significantly speed up the process. Besides, there are many other things you must consider at this stage, which will be explained in the following points.

4. Multiple Payment Gateways

6% of shoppers abandon a cart because “there weren’t enough payment methods

Baymard Survey

If you go to normal stores to buy products, they will offer you multiple options for taking payment. Obviously, a client, when buying plugins and themes from an online platform, will look for various payment methods. If you limit your customers to only one or two payment methods then you are definitely shooting yourself in the foot.

Customers need to have options when they are trying to purchase. As a business owner, you should provide various payment methods,

• All Card Payment
• Bank transfer
• PayPal
• Stripe
• Cash on Delivery
• Bitcoin

4. Send Cart Reminder Emails

A cart reminder email is a targeted message sent to potential customers who have added products to their online shopping cart but left without completing the purchase. Cart reminder emails are designed in such a way that provokes users to buy the product.

Cart reminder emails usually include various incentives like discounts, promo codes, vouchers, and the free shipping option so customers get triggered to buy the product instantly.

If your site is on WordPress, you must have an email marketing plugin installed to send cart reminder emails. weMail is a great email marketing plugin with versatile features. It includes a drag-and-drop email builder by which you can create visually appealing cart reminder emails displaying the products customers have added to the cart.

Besides, weMail covers a vast template library. You can use any of its template to prepare the cart reminder email quickly if you are in short of time.

5. Clear Return & Refund Policies

Clear return and refund policies outline the terms and conditions under which customers are able to return the product and ask for refunds. These policies clearly define the timeframe within which customers will be eligible to return the product and ask for refunds.

Over 30% of customers today check if an eCommerce website really has these policies. Many shoppers hesitate to complete their purchases due to uncertainty about what will happen if the product fails to meet their expectations.

In addition to all these, clear return & refund policies can create a positive impression of your brand in customers’ psychology.

6. Clearly Display the Product Price

The thing that can influence the buying behavior of customers the most is the product price. When customers visit a product, the first thing they want to notice is the price of the product. You are guaranteed never to generate a sale if you don’t display this clearly.

Apart from the original product price, dishonest eCommerce site owners hide many other types of costs. This is frequently seen with delivery charges, especially international delivery fees. We recommend that you never do this.

Because doing so will make you known as a scammer to your customers which will destroy your brand goodwill once and for all.

7. Optimize Your Page To Load Faster

According to many research reports, over 50% of visitors move away to another website if a web page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Hence, you must make every page of your eCommerce site as much lightweight as possible. Considering the below points can help optimize your page loading speed.

• Compress your product images and video clips
• Add your site to a CDN
• Use a caching plugin
• Implement lazy loading
• Minimize HTTP requests
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Choose a Reliable Hosting Provider
• Don’t overload redirects

There are numerous image optimizer and caching plugins that you can use on your site to keep the web pages lightweight. For example, explore the best WordPress image optimizer plugins at the end of this post. Also, take a look at the best WordPress caching plugins.

8. Easy Access To the Cart

One of the important face to reduce abandoned cart rate is to keep the path to the cart easy and simple. So, users can add products to their cart from any page. One of the mistakes the plugin/theme store owners make is that they make the customers dig for the cart page.

As we have said earlier, a complicated checkout process will drive away from the customers. So, you need to make sure users have easy access to their cart.

9. Use Pop-up When The Customers Try to Exit

You can use an exit-intent pop-up. It will appear when a page detects that you want to leave. This is done by tracking your mouse movements, which can reveal your ‘intent’ to close a page.

You can use this pop-up to offer something the customers can’t refuse. This will allow customers to rethink their purchase before finalizing it, sweetening their deal even more.

These are the techniques you can use to decrease the abandoned cart rate.

Now, you know about this, you need to apply it. To do that you need to run email campaigns to win back those customers that left without purchasing. Here’s a list of the best WordPress popup plugins.

Things to Cover in Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

As we said, it is important to win back the customers that left without purchasing the products. It is not certain that after implementing all these techniques customers will not abandon a cart. The one technique that can be used to get your customers back is implementing an abandoned cart campaign.

An abandoned cart email is a follow-up message sent to someone who leaves a website without purchasing the items in their online shopping cart

Yes, we are talking about sending emails to your customers. Sometimes a customer might get distracted while purchasing products. Also, maybe they didn’t purchase because they didn’t find enough information. That is why sending follow-up emails is necessary.

Let us see some statistics first.

• 45% of all cart abandonment emails are opened
• 21% of all cart abandonment emails are clicked
• 50% of those clicks lead to a recovered purchase back on site (Source: Moosend)

These are impressive statistics, aren’t they? This is where lies the opportunity to win back your customers. But you can not send just any emails. You need to follow some rules and regulations before sending out emails.

Include Relevant Content

A customer might have abandoned the checkout process because they didn’t find relevant information regarding the product and purchase. This email gives you the chance to continue the conversation with that customer and provide the information they were craving.

Also, you can include,

• Include photographs of one or two products saved in the customer’s cart as a reminder
• Use a customer service-centric tone. Remember, you want to find the problem
• A headline that connects to your email body
• One Call To Action(CTA)
• It’s good to use your business name.

Offer Discount

It is a very effective way to win back your customers. But first, try to get qualitative insight on why he/she didn’t purchase in the first place. That will help you set a baseline. Once you set a baseline for sales then you can easily recover by running a simple discount campaign for these specific customers.

Timing is Everything

It is very important to know when to send the abandoned cart emails. Else all the emails will be in vain. Here are the timing schedules you should follow.

• After 30 minutes: You should send an email 30 minutes to post last checkout process
• After 24 hours: Send an email after 24 hours after the last checkout was initiated
• After 3-5 days: Send an email after 3-5 days if you don’t hear from sending the 24-hour email.

Customized Designs

It’s never hurt anyone to add a little bit of design and style to everything. So, you can also include HTML designs to your emails to make it look more attractive and eye-catching. weMail is a great tool to customize your email campaigns.

These tips and tricks will help you a great deal to organize your emails and win back the customers you lost.

Final Words on Reducing Abandoned Cart

You need to take the necessary steps to minimize the abandoned cart rate. However, it is unlikely that all cart abandonments will be avoided. Some of them will be for reasons that you can not optimize. So, you need to depend on some mechanisms to bring customers back to where they left off. Don’t worry about your abandoned cart WordPress plugin; you will get the potential clients again.

If you are a plugin/theme owner then we suggest you try a platform like Appsero to sell your products.

It will not only make your business smooth but also you can give your customers satisfaction in buying your products.