4 ways to decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate

If you are managing any kind of webshop, you are probably struggling with shopping cart abandonment.

After users spend some time on your website or app, they may add a few products they’re interested in buying. But at the moment of checkout, they decide otherwise and never finish the transaction and abandon their shopping cart.

Based on different sources and industries, the overall shopping cart abandonment rate is somewhere between 60% and 80%. Just imagine, you are missing out on the potential of more than half your sales.

There are many reasons why shoppers don’t finalize their order.

We collected four of the most common ways to decrease the abandonment rate and dig into the problem a little deeper.

1. Analyze the UX of your user journey

By studying the user journey, from their first visit all the way up to the moment of checkout, you’ll learn a lot. You can try some nifty tools like Hotjar to record the user’s actions and see if somewhere along the way there are obvious drop-out points.

You can also look at your aggregated data and study the conversion funnel, to see at which step most users drop off.

Once you start to see a pattern of UX pain-points can be improved, you can slowly start implementing those changes and see if your abandonment rate starts to improve.

2. Recommend to convert

One of the most common reasons for cart abandonment is shipping costs. If for example, you offer free shipping from $50, and most of your users add on average $30 worth of products to their cart, it is good to rethink your pricing policy.

Alternatively, you can implement a recommendation model that will suggest your users the items they’re most likely to purchase, in a higher price range.

Another option is to suggest items that cost as much as the difference between their basket value, and the minimum they’ll need to get free shipping.

Sometimes, it is a matter of a few dollars that are standing between you and the finalized purchase.

With Stormly, you can build this kind of AI-based recommendation model with a single click. All you need to do is pick the Webshop Insight from the platform and run it on your data.

3. Predict user behavior that leads to lower cart abandonment

If you would know what behavior would lead to lower shopping cart abandonment, you could optimize your product flow to trigger this behavior. Let’s say that people that view three different items within their first 15 minutes of their visit are most likely to complete their purchase, and thus have lower cart abandonment.

Showing what behavioral patterns lead to higher conversion is exactly what the Webshop Analysis Insight does. You can then optimize your UX by showing the top three recommended items for that visitor on most pages, above the fold.

In addition, if they bounce and stop browsing, but do so within 15 minutes of their first visit, you can trigger notifications to make them come back. Notifications can be delivered when a user is not on the website or app, as long as they’ve accepted notifications from you.

4. Review your payment policy

Even if you optimize the entire user journey up till the checkout process, users still need to go through the last step — making the payment. It may turn out that the payment options you provide are not available to your user.

For example, many people outside of the US don’t have access to a credit card. Or the user would want to wait a week or two with the purchase, due to personal expenses or wanting to try on a few items before making a final decision.

Here the main issue is often not wanting to wait for a refund. In these cases users love post-payment options. Services like Klarna prove to increase the conversion rate drastically and make the checkout process incredibly fast and easy.

Of course, there are also some completely unexpected reasons for shopping cart abandonment that you might discover in the process of implementing these 4 steps. Although it is not possible to eliminate it, digging into the problem deeper will let you understand your customer better and maybe get more insight into improving your product.

If you want to measure other metrics, Sign Up for a free trial and try also other Insights like Forecasting, CLV or Retention available on Stormly.