Five tips to reduce the cart abandonment rate

Running a successful ecommerce business is pretty challenging as the competition keeps ramping up with new entrants to the market. High competition means online sellers need to invest lots of resources in developing marketing strategies to attract more web traffic to their stores.

However, all this effort is wasted when customers abandon carts, leaving your site without buying anything. Here are five tips every ecommerce store owner must know to reduce their cart abandonment rate.

What is cart abandonment rate?

The cart abandonment rate represents the percentage of online shoppers that added items to their cart but left the website without completing their purchase. It shows that people are interested in buying the products but are not completing their purchase for some reason.

Ecommerce businesses can calculate their cart abandonment rate with this formula:

CAR = 1 – (completed purchases in a month/shopping carts created in a month) x 100

Why is it important to keep track of cart abandonment rate?

Cart abandonment rate helps ecommerce store owners understand their customers' shopping behavior. For example, a high CAR shows a problem in the checkout process or higher shipping costs than customers are willing to pay.

Solving a high cart abandonment rate is a quick and effective way to increase revenue and gain long-term loyal customers.

How to reduce cart abandonment rate?

Cart abandonment rate is a serious problem for ecommerce stores because it shows how much revenue has been lost in a month. To close business sales successfully and increase revenue, it is vital to reduce this rate.

If your business is struggling with a high number of customers leaving your site without buying anything, here are five things you can do to lower it.

Keep checkout process simple

Customers look for an uncomplicated and quick checkout process. If it is complex, requires too much information, has multiple steps, and takes too long to complete, customers leave the website, abandoning their cart.

That is why you should make sure that your checkout process has minimal steps which are easy to complete. The whole process should not take more than one or two minutes.

One effective way of reducing checkout time is by providing the "save information" option. This way, customers don't have to fill out their contact info every time they buy something from your store.

Allow guest checkout

Most ecommerce stores require signup for making a purchase. This is never a wise idea as customers seek a simple checkout process. Moreover, customers don't want to create a different account for every store they make purchases from.

People also don't like to create too many accounts since it can compromise their online security if an account gets hacked.

To make completing a purchase easy for your customers, make sure your website allows the guest checkout option.

Use exit-intent popups

Exit-intent popup technology shows when a customer displays signs of abandoning their cart. When this happens, you can provide your customers with a discount coupon to entice them to complete their purchase.

This discount code acts as a motivator because a customer may be leaving after looking at the total checkout cost. Moreover, this strategy effectively converts online window shoppers into long-term buyers as the deal is too good to pass.

Offer free shipping

Hidden costs at the checkout page are one of the main reasons behind cart abandonment. Customers don't like to pay more than the estimated cost. That is why, when they see additional shipping costs, they tend to abandon their purchase.

To avoid this issue, ecommerce stores should offer free shipping on shopping carts that reach a certain value. You should also display shipping prices early in the checkout process so customers know what to expect.

Create a sense of urgency

Another excellent strategy to compel buyers to complete their purchase is creating a sense of urgency. For example, show them that the product is almost out of stock and won't be restocked any time soon. Similarly, you could offer them a discount deadline, usually a coupon code that expires in 24 hours.

These limited-time offers motivate customers to complete their purchases as they may not get similarly good offers anywhere else.

Wrapping up

The cart abandonment rate is a good indicator of how engaged your customers are. It can also help you understand the blocks preventing your customers from completing their purchases. Keeping the checkout process simple, offering discounts and time-limited offers, as well as free shipping, can all help motivate your customers to complete their purchases.

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