One cannot argue that ecommerce merchants never face any issue pertaining to maximum cart abandonments. A 2011 study by comScore reveals the customer buying behavior in online shopping as it shows nearly 61% of customers are at least somewhat likely to cancel their entire purchase and abandon their e-carts before they checkout. However, it was the scenario six years ago, but there is a little significant change in customer buying behavior in online shopping as the statistics have increased to 69.23 % on an average only for troubling ecommerce owners (source: Baymard Institute ).
Cart abandonment is rapidly invading all e-commerce businesses as the customers show different behavior while interacting with online shops. It is observed by the researchers that the consumers have new wants and demands from e-shops. And, marketers are unable to retain their online customers because they fail to address those specific needs which makes customers abandon their e-carts.
With this blog, we aim to help you minimize abandoned cart rates for your ecommerce website. Let us begin from the basics!
What is Abandoned Cart?
In simple words, shopping cart abandonment is an e-commerce term denoted to the instance when visitors who add items to their online shopping cart, but exit without completing their purchase (source: Webopedia)
A customer visits an online shopping website and likes to purchase two or three products offered by the estore. He registers either as a returning customer or goes for a guest checkout. Once the registration process is completed, he adds those products in his cart. Then, he proceeds to check out for making the purchase. Here, two things are possible:
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Customer makes a purchase and successfully makes the payment
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Customer returns back to the website without making payment and abandons the purchase
So if your visitors undertake action number 1- Congratulations! If your visitors undertake action number 2- hard work is to be done!
Why Customers Abandon their Shopping Carts?
We needed the recent data to exemplify the major reasons why customers tend to discard their carts while shopping online. Therefore, our team conducted Abandoned Cart Survey in both online & offline modes for collecting the recent data through direct interaction with the people.
Recorded as on 7 July 2017
As the above statistics suggest, issues such as technical error while placing order, processing payment and delay in shipping the product are the major reasons why you lost a considerable number of sales.
What could be the Effective Ways to Retain Online Customers?
With every single abandoned cart, you are losing a good revenue which means you should implement potent strategies for successful online customer retention. Good products, reasonable pricing and hassle free shopping experience leads to customer satisfaction. The more customer are satisfied with your services, the more increase in your sales.
The following mantras, if implemented strategically, restore your lost product sales as it minimize the abandoned checkouts:
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Researching upon your customers is a good idea. From your panel, keep a check upon how many customers added the products in their cart but still waiting to checkout. This will help you see if there is any error in your website which has kept the customer waiting or if his interest in the chosen product is lost.
Software makes it easy! Integrate a good abandoned cart application to your website which sets up automated abandoned cart recovery. Applications such as Cartstack & Cartrescuer, run in the background and send reminder emails to the customers who left without checkout.
A personalized automated email campaign drives your customer back to your website. Many applications offer the feature of white labelling their email delivery system for sending the recovery emails from your domain.
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Inspect the Abandoned Carts
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Activate a compatible Abandoned Cart Application
- Automated Emails Recovery Campaigns
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Ad Remarketing
Set your ad campaign to remarketing in Google Adwords. It is a myth that ad remarketing irritates customers. Through ad remarketing, you can actually remind your customer that he has forgotten to place the order for the product he added in his cart at your website.
Minimizing the high abandonment rates and restoring the lost sales is easy with the above discussed ways and. Try these hacks today and recover not only the abandoned carts but also checkouts.