08/12/2022

How To Handle Abandoned Ecommerce Rate

Insights

25 min remaining

Abandoned shopping Carts dramatically reduce the revenue of ecommerce shops.

A customer may abandon their cart if they add products to the cart but leave before the checkout process is complete.

You can easily calculate your ecommerce abandonment rates and increase them.

First, you need to understand why abandonment occurs. Sometimes consumers get distracted or busy. If your website causes abandonment, let us know.

You can identify patterns in your website data that could lead to an abandonment rate by digging deep. You can then make targeted changes and A/B-test these changes for better results.

Let’s take a look at the main factors that affect abandonment rates, and then we will show you how to improve your website so that you can generate more ecommerce revenues.

How do you calculate the abandonment rate on an ecommerce site?

The abandonment rate can be expressed as a percentage.

The first number represents the number who completed shopping cart transactions. The second number represents the number who created shopping carts and added at least one item but never completed the transaction.

These two numbers can be used to get a bigger picture of how many people add items and how many make purchases.

Low cart abandonment rates indicate that your site is providing a great user experience. Your site is easy to use and makes them feel at ease.

A high rate of cart abandonment can indicate the exact opposite. But, testing is not enough to determine what factors are causing your visitors’ frustrations.

Cart abandonment rate formula

You can calculate the percentage once you know the cart abandonment ratio.

Divide the number of transactions completed by the total number of shopping carts that have at least one item. The percentage is then calculated by multiplying the 100th result. This will give you the percentage of successful checkouts. If you subtract 100% from it, you will get your abandonment rate. 

Let’s assume you have 200 transactions completed this month and 300 shopping carts in total. Divide 200 by 300 to get.66. Divide.66 by 100 to get 66%. 100% – 66% equates to 34%, which is your abandonment rate.

Statistics on Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates [2018]

According to the most recent statistics, shopping cart abandonment rates are 78.65%, an increase of just over 77% from the previous year. Different sources may claim different rates.

Statista has slightly different results when it comes to tracking abandonment rates for carts over multiple years. 2017’s abandonment rate was just below 70%.

The trends are interesting, but abandonment rates in 2006 were below 60 percent. This could be due to the growing number of ecommerce options that consumers have.

Moosend states that the abandonment rate of carts in the United States is somewhat lower than in other regions but close to the global average.

Moosend notes, however, that marketers who use automation software experience a 50% increase in conversion rates.

Why is my cart abandonment rate so high?

You need to identify the cause of high cart abandonment rates. Many factors could cause customers to abandon their carts before they go to checkout.

These are the most popular.

Unexpected costs

Unexpected fees can cause website visitors to abandon their carts. This is a major turnoff as the total amount due has increased.

Shipping charges are often the culprit. Make it clear on your website if you have shipping charges. It is possible to tell customers what shipping costs are so that they understand exactly what they can expect.

Total cost not available

Customers want to know what they will pay at checkout. They might be surprised when they get to the end if you don’t disclose the full amount, including shipping and taxes.

Give as much information as possible to your customers and include relevant details at the beginning of the checkout process. This will ensure that no one feels left out at the end.

An account is required

For a variety of reasons, consumers decide not to open an account on a website.

  • Privacy
  • Email inboxes complete
  • Time crunch
  • Uncertainty regarding the purchase

They might abandon their carts if you force them into creating an account.

Lowe’s lets you sign up to create an account or check out as a guest.

If you want the saw blade fast, you don’t need to make an account. To reduce abandonment rates, show the same kindness to your visitors.

Long-winded Checkout

People who are busy often abandon a lengthy checkout process when presented with it. It seems impossible to complete the task in a single moment.

Check out your checkout form. Is there anything you can cut or condense in your checkout form? Perhaps you could split your checkout process across two or more pages to make it easier.

Confusion at Checkout

Clear instructions should be given for each field. If you ask your customer for their birthdate, be sure to include an example (e.g. 01/01/1973 or 01-01-1973. The same applies to any entry that requires a particular format.

Consider adding a progress bar to multi-page contact forms. This will make your customer feel more at ease with the checkout process. The end is near!

Website Timeout

If you want your ecommerce store to be a success, you need reliable web hosting. Customers are frustrated as much by website crashes and timeouts as entrepreneurs. You don’t want this to happen on your website.

Trust issues

I have spoken before about trust signals and social proof on your websites so that consumers feel more at ease with you.

These trust signals can boost your confidence by including customer testimonials, an SSL certificate, and certification badges.

No Return Policy

It is important to have a clear return policy. Consumers want to know what happens if they aren’t satisfied with what you sent, if it arrives damaged, or if it is a gift that someone else already has. A chart such as Best Buy is useful if you have multiple policies.

Even if the return policy is only valid for 30 days, let people know. You’ll let them know that they have time to review the product and decide if they want to keep it. Your return policy should specify when and how customers will be refunded.

Insufficient payment alternatives

Some people are uncomfortable with certain online banking options. Some people don’t like using online banking services such as Payoneer or Paypal.

You can attract more customers if you offer more payment options. You don’t have to eliminate potential revenue. Instead, add more payment options to your website.

Long Wait for Delivery

A long delivery time is another problem that could lead to high abandonment rates. Your customer will look elsewhere if they don’t receive their order within two weeks if you are unable to deliver it in the next five working days.

You can compete with Amazon and other giants such as Amazon by finding more efficient delivery methods. You might not be able to offer this level of service but you can reduce cart abandonment by shortening the delivery time.

8 Ways to Reduce the Cart Abandonment Rate in Your Ecommerce Store

1. Trust your website, visitors

Trust is very important for consumers, as we have already mentioned. They want to feel safe, so they must have every reason to trust you.

While trust badges and seals are helpful, make sure they are legitimate.

Reaffirm any security policies such as the refusal to share customer data with third parties.

Trust can also be built through your copy. Your website’s checkout page should be written with respect and a desire to please your customers.

Trust levels can be increased exponentially by encrypting credit card numbers and passwords as customers enter them.

Keep your SSL certificate current and add any additional trust-enhancing features, such as an “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau.

2. Increase your checkout process

There is no perfect checkout process. It all depends on your product and the target customer.

If you have a small online shop that sells less expensive products, then one-page checkout forms may be a good idea.

You might need more information if your products are larger or if you have multiple SKUs.

You can also visually reduce the checkout process to make it easier for customers. Use a smaller font size and more text boxes. Drop-down menus are useful in certain situations so that your customer doesn’t have to type as much.

3. Mobile optimization is a must for your ecommerce website

Recent data shows that more than 60% of consumers have made purchases at an ecommerce website in the past six months using their mobile phones. Your target customers likely surf your website using their smartphones.

Your site will lose revenue if it doesn’t have a responsive design or a mobile-friendly alternative site. A non-optimized website will have a checkout page that is difficult to use on a small phone. The majority of people have too big fingers to touch the screen in the correct places.

4. Offer live chat

A J.D. A power study found that live chat is the most preferred communication method among consumers. It is preferred over phone calls and email, as well as SMS.

More than half of customers would prefer to contact support via live chat rather than calling a number on their phones.

What does this all mean for your ecommerce website? Live chat is a great way to make sure you are available to answer customer questions in real time.

You can answer a quick question to help customers decide whether to purchase your product. This will ensure that the customer does not leave to buy your product elsewhere.

5. Get discounts and other benefits

To prevent abandoned carts, you can use a tool such as Hello Bar by offering a discount and/or another incentive. Perhaps a customer is interested but not able to afford one of your products. The customer clicks away from the website and finds something similar:

The cost hurdle has been overcome, which may be enough to redirect the customer to your site to continue the checkout process.

6. Smart upsells

Your customer’s desire to purchase more products can rise if he or she has more items in their cart. It’s almost like shopping in a store. You’re less likely than others to abandon your shopping carts after you have filled them with three shirts and four pairs of pants and one pair of shoes.

Customers might be more likely to buy additional merchandise if you cross-sell or upsell them.

This will not only increase your customer revenue but also lower your cart abandonment rate. Make sure the products you suggest match what the customer already has.

7. You can improve the user experience by observing how your visitors navigate your site.

To find any potential obstacles, visitor recordings will help you determine how visitors navigate your website. If you find that most of your visitors abandon carts after viewing your checkout form, then you may need to reduce it or divide it across several steps.

Recordings allow you to see which users are having trouble navigating between pages or entering certain information.

Let’s suppose you want to ask visitors for their phone numbers but they don’t know the correct format. They will try many times, and at worst, give up.

Use a tool to monitor user behavior

Kobe Digital, a user behavior tool, allows you to create five user behavior reports: Heatmaps and Scrollmaps; Confetti Reports; List Reports; and Overlay Reports. Each report provides unique information about visitor activity.

When using a user behavior tool, pay attention to heat maps. You will want to see where to click activity is highest.

8. A/B test your call-to-action

You can gain further insight by running A/B testing on important website elements such as calls to action.

Traditional A/B testing presents two versions of the same page to your visitors. Half of the visitors will see the original version, while the other half will view the variation. You can determine which CTA is performing best based on conversion rates.

Kobe Digital also uses a multi-armed baptist approach to A/B testing.

Traffic is not evenly distributed between variants in a multi-armed bandit test A/B. Traffic is not evenly divided between variants. The higher-performing variants get more traffic, and this ratio changes as more information are collected during the test.

This approach has the advantage of ensuring that you don’t lose traffic to an underperforming variant and that your losses are minimized.

Conclusion

High cart abandonment rates can hurt your sales and revenue. If you are diligent in weeding out issues and improving customer experience, you can encourage more customers to complete the checkout.

Here are eight tips to reduce cart abandonment rates. This handy checklist can be used often:

  1. Trust your website, visitors
  2. Streamline your checkout process
  3. Mobile optimization of your ecommerce site
  4. Live chat available
  5. Get discounts and other benefits
  6. Smart upsells
  7. View visitor recordings and create user behavior reports
  8. Test your CTAs A/B

These tips will help you make more sales by removing obstacles from the checkout process.

Abandoned shopping Carts dramatically reduce the revenue of ecommerce shops.

A customer may abandon their cart if they add products to the cart but leave before the checkout process is complete.

You can easily calculate your ecommerce abandonment rates and increase them.

First, you need to understand why abandonment occurs. Sometimes consumers get distracted or busy. If your website causes abandonment, let us know.

You can identify patterns in your website data that could lead to an abandonment rate by digging deep. You can then make targeted changes and A/B-test these changes for better results.

Let’s take a look at the main factors that affect abandonment rates, and then we will show you how to improve your website so that you can generate more ecommerce revenues.

How do you calculate the abandonment rate on an ecommerce site?

The abandonment rate can be expressed as a percentage.

The first number represents the number who completed shopping cart transactions. The second number represents the number who created shopping carts and added at least one item but never completed the transaction.

These two numbers can be used to get a bigger picture of how many people add items and how many make purchases.

Low cart abandonment rates indicate that your site is providing a great user experience. Your site is easy to use and makes them feel at ease.

A high rate of cart abandonment can indicate the exact opposite. But, testing is not enough to determine what factors are causing your visitors’ frustrations.

Cart abandonment rate formula

You can calculate the percentage once you know the cart abandonment ratio.

Divide the number of transactions completed by the total number of shopping carts that have at least one item. The percentage is then calculated by multiplying the 100th result. This will give you the percentage of successful checkouts. If you subtract 100% from it, you will get your abandonment rate. 

Let’s assume you have 200 transactions completed this month and 300 shopping carts in total. Divide 200 by 300 to get.66. Divide.66 by 100 to get 66%. 100% – 66% equates to 34%, which is your abandonment rate.

Statistics on Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates [2018]

According to the most recent statistics, shopping cart abandonment rates are 78.65%, an increase of just over 77% from the previous year. Different sources may claim different rates.

Statista has slightly different results when it comes to tracking abandonment rates for carts over multiple years. 2017’s abandonment rate was just below 70%.

The trends are interesting, but abandonment rates in 2006 were below 60 percent. This could be due to the growing number of ecommerce options that consumers have.

Moosend states that the abandonment rate of carts in the United States is somewhat lower than in other regions but close to the global average.

Moosend notes, however, that marketers who use automation software experience a 50% increase in conversion rates.

Why is my cart abandonment rate so high?

You need to identify the cause of high cart abandonment rates. Many factors could cause customers to abandon their carts before they go to checkout.

These are the most popular.

Unexpected costs

Unexpected fees can cause website visitors to abandon their carts. This is a major turnoff as the total amount due has increased.

Shipping charges are often the culprit. Make it clear on your website if you have shipping charges. It is possible to tell customers what shipping costs are so that they understand exactly what they can expect.

Total cost not available

Customers want to know what they will pay at checkout. They might be surprised when they get to the end if you don’t disclose the full amount, including shipping and taxes.

Give as much information as possible to your customers and include relevant details at the beginning of the checkout process. This will ensure that no one feels left out at the end.

An account is required

For a variety of reasons, consumers decide not to open an account on a website.

  • Privacy
  • Email inboxes complete
  • Time crunch
  • Uncertainty regarding the purchase

They might abandon their carts if you force them into creating an account.

Lowe’s lets you sign up to create an account or check out as a guest.

If you want the saw blade fast, you don’t need to make an account. To reduce abandonment rates, show the same kindness to your visitors.

Long-winded Checkout

People who are busy often abandon a lengthy checkout process when presented with it. It seems impossible to complete the task in a single moment.

Check out your checkout form. Is there anything you can cut or condense in your checkout form? Perhaps you could split your checkout process across two or more pages to make it easier.

Confusion at Checkout

Clear instructions should be given for each field. If you ask your customer for their birthdate, be sure to include an example (e.g. 01/01/1973 or 01-01-1973. The same applies to any entry that requires a particular format.

Consider adding a progress bar to multi-page contact forms. This will make your customer feel more at ease with the checkout process. The end is near!

Website Timeout

If you want your ecommerce store to be a success, you need reliable web hosting. Customers are frustrated as much by website crashes and timeouts as entrepreneurs. You don’t want this to happen on your website.

Trust issues

I have spoken before about trust signals and social proof on your websites so that consumers feel more at ease with you.

These trust signals can boost your confidence by including customer testimonials, an SSL certificate, and certification badges.

No Return Policy

It is important to have a clear return policy. Consumers want to know what happens if they aren’t satisfied with what you sent, if it arrives damaged, or if it is a gift that someone else already has. A chart such as Best Buy is useful if you have multiple policies.

Even if the return policy is only valid for 30 days, let people know. You’ll let them know that they have time to review the product and decide if they want to keep it. Your return policy should specify when and how customers will be refunded.

Insufficient payment alternatives

Some people are uncomfortable with certain online banking options. Some people don’t like using online banking services such as Payoneer or Paypal.

You can attract more customers if you offer more payment options. You don’t have to eliminate potential revenue. Instead, add more payment options to your website.

Long Wait for Delivery

A long delivery time is another problem that could lead to high abandonment rates. Your customer will look elsewhere if they don’t receive their order within two weeks if you are unable to deliver it in the next five working days.

You can compete with Amazon and other giants such as Amazon by finding more efficient delivery methods. You might not be able to offer this level of service but you can reduce cart abandonment by shortening the delivery time.

8 Ways to Reduce the Cart Abandonment Rate in Your Ecommerce Store

1. Trust your website, visitors

Trust is very important for consumers, as we have already mentioned. They want to feel safe, so they must have every reason to trust you.

While trust badges and seals are helpful, make sure they are legitimate.

Reaffirm any security policies such as the refusal to share customer data with third parties.

Trust can also be built through your copy. Your website’s checkout page should be written with respect and a desire to please your customers.

Trust levels can be increased exponentially by encrypting credit card numbers and passwords as customers enter them.

Keep your SSL certificate current and add any additional trust-enhancing features, such as an “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau.

2. Increase your checkout process

There is no perfect checkout process. It all depends on your product and the target customer.

If you have a small online shop that sells less expensive products, then one-page checkout forms may be a good idea.

You might need more information if your products are larger or if you have multiple SKUs.

You can also visually reduce the checkout process to make it easier for customers. Use a smaller font size and more text boxes. Drop-down menus are useful in certain situations so that your customer doesn’t have to type as much.

3. Mobile optimization is a must for your ecommerce website

Recent data shows that more than 60% of consumers have made purchases at an ecommerce website in the past six months using their mobile phones. Your target customers likely surf your website using their smartphones.

Your site will lose revenue if it doesn’t have a responsive design or a mobile-friendly alternative site. A non-optimized website will have a checkout page that is difficult to use on a small phone. The majority of people have too big fingers to touch the screen in the correct places.

4. Offer live chat

A J.D. A power study found that live chat is the most preferred communication method among consumers. It is preferred over phone calls and email, as well as SMS.

More than half of customers would prefer to contact support via live chat rather than calling a number on their phones.

What does this all mean for your ecommerce website? Live chat is a great way to make sure you are available to answer customer questions in real time.

You can answer a quick question to help customers decide whether to purchase your product. This will ensure that the customer does not leave to buy your product elsewhere.

5. Get discounts and other benefits

To prevent abandoned carts, you can use a tool such as Hello Bar by offering a discount and/or another incentive. Perhaps a customer is interested but not able to afford one of your products. The customer clicks away from the website and finds something similar:

The cost hurdle has been overcome, which may be enough to redirect the customer to your site to continue the checkout process.

6. Smart upsells

Your customer’s desire to purchase more products can rise if he or she has more items in their cart. It’s almost like shopping in a store. You’re less likely than others to abandon your shopping carts after you have filled them with three shirts and four pairs of pants and one pair of shoes.

Customers might be more likely to buy additional merchandise if you cross-sell or upsell them.

This will not only increase your customer revenue but also lower your cart abandonment rate. Make sure the products you suggest match what the customer already has.

7. You can improve the user experience by observing how your visitors navigate your site.

To find any potential obstacles, visitor recordings will help you determine how visitors navigate your website. If you find that most of your visitors abandon carts after viewing your checkout form, then you may need to reduce it or divide it across several steps.

Recordings allow you to see which users are having trouble navigating between pages or entering certain information.

Let’s suppose you want to ask visitors for their phone numbers but they don’t know the correct format. They will try many times, and at worst, give up.

Use a tool to monitor user behavior

Kobe Digital, a user behavior tool, allows you to create five user behavior reports: Heatmaps and Scrollmaps; Confetti Reports; List Reports; and Overlay Reports. Each report provides unique information about visitor activity.

When using a user behavior tool, pay attention to heat maps. You will want to see where to click activity is highest.

8. A/B test your call-to-action

You can gain further insight by running A/B testing on important website elements such as calls to action.

Traditional A/B testing presents two versions of the same page to your visitors. Half of the visitors will see the original version, while the other half will view the variation. You can determine which CTA is performing best based on conversion rates.

Kobe Digital also uses a multi-armed baptist approach to A/B testing.

Traffic is not evenly distributed between variants in a multi-armed bandit test A/B. Traffic is not evenly divided between variants. The higher-performing variants get more traffic, and this ratio changes as more information are collected during the test.

This approach has the advantage of ensuring that you don’t lose traffic to an underperforming variant and that your losses are minimized.

Conclusion

High cart abandonment rates can hurt your sales and revenue. If you are diligent in weeding out issues and improving customer experience, you can encourage more customers to complete the checkout.

Here are eight tips to reduce cart abandonment rates. This handy checklist can be used often:

  1. Trust your website, visitors
  2. Streamline your checkout process
  3. Mobile optimization of your ecommerce site
  4. Live chat available
  5. Get discounts and other benefits
  6. Smart upsells
  7. View visitor recordings and create user behavior reports
  8. Test your CTAs A/B

These tips will help you make more sales by removing obstacles from the checkout process.

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.