Can you imagine going to the grocery store and filling up your cart just to get distracted and leave the store before checking out? I bet you don’t do that very often.

This scenario happens all the time online, though. In fact, average online shopping cart abandonment rates hover just under 70%, according to an analysis by the Baymard Institute.

Don’t worry — there’s good news too. An estimated 60% of abandoned online sales are recoverable, according to Business Insider (BI) Intelligence.

Ecommerce businesses can use many different strategies and tools to recover these sales. In this blog post, we’ll go over some of the most effective shopping cart abandonment solutions for ecommerce companies.

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Performing a shopping cart abandonment analysis

Shoppers abandon their carts for a wide range of reasons, including:

• Not trusting a site with their personal information
• Getting distracted
• Deciding to do more research before making a purchase
• Website glitches and other technical problems
• Long or confusing checkout processes
• And many other reasons

To improve your shopping cart recovery, you need to determine why users abandon their carts on your site. Then, you can decide on the right shopping cart abandonment solutions for your situation.

To determine why your shoppers are leaving their carts, you can conduct a shopping cart abandonment analysis. This analysis will involve digging into your website user data and conversion process, as well as possibly A/B testing.

The experts at WebFX can conduct a shopping cart abandonment analysis for your website. We’ll conduct an in-depth examination of your conversion and checkout processes and suggest solutions for reducing your cart abandonment rate.

Potential shopping cart abandonment solutions fall into two main categories:

• Shopping cart recovery: Shopping cart recovery strategies involve bringing visitors who abandoned their shopping carts back to your website to complete their purchases.
• Shopping cart abandonment prevention: You can also use various strategies to prevent shoppers from abandoning their carts in the first place. These techniques often fall under the umbrella of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Shopping cart recovery through retargeting

Retargeting, also called remarketing, involves advertising or marketing to customers who have previously visited your website. In the case of shopping cart recovery, you would remarket to shoppers who placed items in their cart but didn’t complete the checkout process.

You can retarget customers through various channels, including:

• Online ads
• Email
• SMS

These ads or messages might remind shoppers about the items they left in their cart. You might also include a special discount code or another incentive to encourage them to complete their purchase.

Retargeting works using cookies ­— small text files that websites store in users’ browsers to identify them and remember basic information about them. Cookies can tell a website whether a given user has previously visited the site and whether they left any unpurchased items in their cart, for example.

If a user abandons their cart, a cookie stored in their browser can trigger a personalized remarketing ad, email, or text message.

Cart abandonment prevention through CRO

In addition to retargeting, you can use CRO tactics to increase the percentage of shoppers who complete the purchase process.

CRO can prevent some cart abandonment from happening in the first place. It can also encourage people you bring back to your site through retargeting to complete the checkout process.

There are many widely varying approaches you can use to increase your conversion rate. The right ones for you depend on the most common reasons shoppers abandon carts on your website. You can uncover these reasons through a shopping cart abandonment analysis.

As part of the CRO process, you should also conduct A/B testing to determine which changes increase conversions the most.

A/B testing involves testing two versions of a webpage against each other to see which performs best. For example, you might try placing your call to action (CTA) in different places on two different versions of a page and testing which design leads to more conversions.

Some of the best CRO updates for reducing shopping cart abandonment include:

• CTA buttons: Your CTA buttons encourage people to complete the checkout process, and they also help shoppers navigate through the process. Make sure your buttons have a clear, strong CTA and are easy to spot on your pages.
• Exit-intent popups: Exit-intent popups appear when a user shows signs of leaving your site. If a shopper moves their mouse toward the exit button during the checkout process, for example, you could offer them a special discount to entice them not to abandon their cart.
• Live chat or chatbots: One reason shoppers abandon their carts is confusion about your products, processes, or policies. If you add a chatbot or live chat feature to your website, you give your customers the chance to easily get answers to their questions, rather than abandoning their carts.
• Social proof and trust badges: Showing shoppers why they should trust you during the checkout process can reduce cart abandonment. Purchase an SSL certificate, which authenticates your website’s identity and protects your visitors’ information. Also, add testimonials as well as trust badges, like those from cybersecurity and payment processing companies, to your site.
• A simple and transparent checkout process: Shoppers don’t want to spend time going through a lengthy, confusing checkout process. Make your checkout process as short and effortless as you can, and include a progress bar to show shoppers how close they are to completing the process.
• No hidden fees: According to the Baymard Institute, high extra costs are one of the top reasons users abandon their carts during checkout. Making efforts to reduce your fees and being upfront about all costs, such as shipping costs, can reduce abandonment. Make sure it’s easy for users to see and understand all their costs while going through checkout.
• Payment options: Shoppers might also abandon their carts if they find they can’t use their preferred payment methods. Maximize the payment options available to shoppers, including credit cards and services such as PayPal. You can even partner with companies like Klarna and Afterpay to allow customers to pay in installments or delay payment.
• Guest checkout: Some users may not want to make an account to check out, so make sure you include an option to check out as a guest.
• Load time: If a page takes a long time to load, shoppers may get frustrated and go elsewhere. Reducing load time through page speed optimization may reduce shopping cart abandonment.

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Shopping cart abandonment services from WebFX

Want to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate and increase your conversions? Consider working with WebFX. Our shopping cart abandonment services include:

• Shopping cart abandonment analysis
• Ad retargeting
• Email remarketing
• CRO services
• And more

Our team of more than 300 digital marketing experts has generated over $2.4 billion in revenue for our clients over the last five years. We’d love to drive results for your business too! Request a free quote online or call us at 888-601-5359.