Learn how to recover abandoned carts
- May 26, 2021
Abandonment - Let's understand the concept
70% of all e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned before checkout!
Cart abandonment can be frustrating and disheartening. It’s hard enough to attract people to your website, make them add products to the cart, and then they leave before finalizing the purchase …
Here we understand that there are several phases and problems – you might see yourself in one of these scenarios:
- Search abandonment occurs when a buyer views a product, but never adds it to the cart.
- Abandoning the cart is the next step to search abandonment. It is when a visitor adds a product, and… it ends there.
- Checkout abandonment is when a visitor adds an item to the cart and begins the checkout procedure (filling in his / her information) but then abandons the purchase before finishing the order and payment.
Why do visitors abandon my shopping cart?
Let’s see the most common reasons for this to happen, and also some cart recovery solutions:
1) Window Shopping: this was a well-known term even before the internet existed.
How many people do this? More than half of all people who abandon the cart! The Baymard Institute estimates that 58.6% of U.S. buyers abandon the cart just because they are simply window shopping.
But as we like to say, where there is a problem, there is a solution! Even for people who are just watching! You can always follow one of these examples to turn onlookers into buyers:
- Display true warnings about limited availability or low stock
- List all your promotions to encourage purchase
- Collect their email and re-engage them with a cart recovery email
- Remarketing over the next few days
2) Too high prices or unexpected costs: often, the culprit of the unexpected cost is shipping costs.
The way to turn this abandonment of the shopping cart around is:
- Offer free shipping: through a certain purchase price.
- Anticipate shipping fees at a fixed rate: For example, “shipping costs to Portugal at 5 €”. By listing this cost in advance, you soon avoid a bad experience of surprising visitors later in the final check out.
- Clarify explicit shipping costs: List shipping costs at the beginning of the funnel. If you offer free postage, say this right at the top of each page.
Basically, it means being the most direct and transparent about all costs before visitors reach a final stage.
3) Promo Code: When your potential customers are about to make a purchase and see an empty “apply coupon” field, many of them make a pause. The empty field whispers, “There’s a discount out there, you just need to find me!”
Depending on how often you offer coupons or discounts, there are a few solutions for handling this:
- Provide codes on the site: instead of sending buyers to Google, keep them on your site with a link to “find an offer”, “see all active offers” or a relevant promotional bar on checkout pages.
- Pre-applied codes: If you are using a promotional code to drive email traffic to a product page, auto-fill the promotional field with that code.
4) Trust is key: Building a bridge of trust is a complex process that starts from the first moment a visitor hears about your brand or views your website.
Solutions:
- Show real product reviews
- Display trusted badges
- Real companies have their address and phone number on the website footer
5) Technical problems
- Too much time loading a page
- The website crashed
- Payment processing failures
- Poor responsiveness on mobile devices
Solution: These are simple things to fix – you may want to check your website periodically to check for any problems.
6) The checkout process gave them a headache: Many e-commerces have not optimized their checkout process. As a result, potential customers face all sorts of unnecessary friction or confusion when trying to make a purchase.
- Difficulty updating or adjusting products in the cart
- Disruptive warnings or annoying pop-ups
- Unclear direction of progress (ie, no progress indicator)
- Unclear next steps
- Too many form fields
- Confusing error messages
- Few and/or weak payment options
- Offer the option to check out without having to log in or register
Solution: REmarketing, REtargeting, REchase them!
Sounds weird, but… if they leave, go get them back again!
On the Facebook platform, use the pixel on your website to understand who is visiting you. In Google Analytics you can share that information with Google Ads and create remarketing lists. (Read this quick guide to learn how to use Google Ads).
This strategy has already proven to be successful in several businesses. It is normal for the highest conversion rates to occur in audiences that have already interacted with your website.
You can also run email campaigns by sending products that users have abandoned. There are tools that facilitate the process. Simplifier can help you send multiple products on a single link and see when the user has opened the message.
Strategy for NON-abandonment of the shopping cart
There are several factors to take into account when retargeting, including determining when a visitor returns to complete the purchase (so that they do not continue getting retargeted). Thus, a specialized digital marketing agency must be taken into account to manage your campaigns. Therefore:
- Segment your visitors: The process starts with properly targeting your visitor list. Group your website visitors into segments based on their actions so you can create levers for each list. The more actions a visitor takes on your website, the more valuable they are to your campaign.
- Be careful on the frequency: Monitor how many impressions users are getting on average, especially if there is a risk that a user will fall into multiple lists or segments.
- Raise your campaign to a level of exclusive ads: The creation of different ads for each segment avoids fatigue and creates a more pleasant experience for the customer.
Do you need any help? We’re here!
Visitors who arrive at the cart have already committed to making a purchase – they just need a little help to complete the purchase.
This makes cart abandonment a great opportunity for brands that want to convert lost sales into profitable customer relationships.
If you’re not sure how to do this, we can help
