Dude, Where’s Your Cart?
On shopping carts and abandonment issues… Cart abandonment is pretty high up on the list of things that keep marketers up at night. And with good reason. According to a report from SaleCycle the average rate at which a consumer abandons their shopping cart before making a purchase is over 84 per cent. The travel […]
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On shopping carts and abandonment issues…
Cart abandonment is pretty high up on the list of things that keep marketers up at night. And with good reason. According to a report from SaleCycle the average rate at which a consumer abandons their shopping cart before making a purchase is over 84 per cent. The travel sector has one of the highest abandonment rates of any eCommerce vertical, at 85 per cent. Completion rates on desktop and tablets hover around 13 per cent, while mobile completion rates stand at just 8.5 per cent.
To calculate the abandonment rate, divide your total transactions completed by transactions initiated. The result will give you the percentage rate of the site visitors who intended to make the purchase but haven’t actually completed the process.
It is a serious issue; cart abandonment represents a major gap in potential conversions. Annually, abandoned carts cost marketers about $2 trillion, according to calculations by Business Insider. The first step towards getting shoppers closer to the elusive “Buy” button is to start actively tracking and analysing shopping cart abandonment KPIs. Make sure you are differentiating between checkout abandonment and cart abandonment. Cart abandonment refers to dropouts of customers with products left in their shopping carts but who had not yet begun the checkout process, checkout abandonment refers to customers who have abandoned the site during the checkout process.
According to the Baymard Institute, the most common reasons behind customers abandoning shopping carts includes expensive shipping fees (55 per cent), websites asking customers to create a unique sign up (34 per cent), complicated checkout processes (26 per cent), distrust of the site with regard to credit card information (17 per cent), technical snags like errors and crashes (17 per cent) and rigid payment options (6 per cent).
If you are unclear about why customers are dropping off mid-stage, A/B testing software such as Optimizely will allow you to experiment with different navigation options by splitting the traffic. The software collects data, then uses an advanced statistical engine to inform you about which route is performing better.
Exit-intent pop-ups or layovers are an obvious strategy to try and retain customers and work by reminding visitors to complete their purchase just before they exit the website. Cart abandonment solution Adoric integrates with Shopify and creates these attractive pop-ups tested to give you higher chances of converting your visitors into returning customers.
WooCommerce, the open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress, captures the email address of users while they are on the checkout page. If the purchase is not completed within 15 minutes, it has an option to start sending an automated series of follow up emails within 1-hour, 24-hour and 72-hour intervals. Retargeting emails can be customised by the brand to remind consumers to complete the purchase, ask for feedback or offer a custom discount that will entice potential buyers to complete the purchase. Retargeted ads are standard practice for many marketing strategies because they’ve historically worked and are a vast improvement to traditional display ads. Retargeting ads are supposed to be 76 per cent more likely to be clicked on than non-retargeted display ads. Recart, another Shopify friendly plug-in, adds an element of nuance to the retargeted messaging. For example, it integrates with Facebook Messenger and offers a selection of automated Messenger campaigns to help you get your abandoning visitors back to your store. You can also pepper the messages with deep links that take the user directly to the checkout page to continue where they left off.
The shopper hustle
To look at it another way, some consumers are using cart abandonment as a negotiating tactic. It’s the digital equivalent of street bargaining by walking away from a vendor with the intention that he will lower the price and call you back. A study from Mindshare found that millennials are looking at ways to game the system by clearing their browsers and search histories to keep online prices down and abandoning their shopping carts to trigger an email discount code.
Not all retargeting strategies are created equal. Marketers could look at the nature of any deals they offer to retarget customers back to the site. To deal with potential intentional cart abandonment, retarget only new customers, limit discounts to more profitable products and use technology to apply multiple filters to trigger different types of offers. The idea here is to identify patterns in behaviour and not offer the same discounts to all. The HubSpot Dynamic Coupon Code Generation plugin can come in handy here. Its smart solution is designed to auto-generate digital coupon codes for the targeted audience. It uses Customer RFM Ratings to simplify the redeeming process for single-use coupons generated for each customer. It also has an automatic bulk coupon generation option which works well with categorical segmented audiences. Targeted coupons generation flaunts the personalised efforts of the brand and drives customer loyalty.
Conclusion
It’s not all bad news when dealing with abandoned carts though it might not always feel that way. It still stands as a good indication of buyer intent and an opportunity to re-engage interested website visitors with remarketing techniques. Take the small wins.
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