Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate in Your Shopify Store
5 Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate in Your Shopify Store
Shopping cart abandonment is a serious problem for all kinds of companies. According to the Baymard Institute, around 69.57% of all shopping carts are abandoned. This means only around 30% of your customers actually end up buying what they add to their baskets.
The issue is so significant it’s believed around $4.6 trillion in merchandise is left unpurchased in online shopping carts, as customers end up being distracted by something new.
The good news? You don’t have to live with a high abandonment rate.
What is Cart Abandonment Rate?
You can calculate cart abandonment rate by determining how many people add items to carts in your Shopify store and leave without buying anything.
If you have your own Shopify store, you can examine your cart abandonment rate using the Dashboards section of your Shopify store. With the Online Store Conversion rate widget, you should be able to calculate your average cart abandonment rate by breaking down your sales funnel into 3 separate stages, like so:
If your shopping cart abandonment rate is high, you know you need to take steps to engage your audience and stop them from jumping ship.
But how exactly do you reduce shopping cart abandonment?
Here 5 methods that work.
1. Stay with Customers Through the Full Buyer Journey
There’s more to a customer making a purchase on your store than someone simply clicking on a link and hitting the “buy” button. If you want to learn how to reduce cart abandonment rate, you first need to understand the customer buying journey, and how you can accompany them every step of the way.
By connecting with your customers through multiple touchpoints, or ecommerce micro-moments, you develop a deeper sense of engagement, which improves your chances of a conversion. With an app like Dialogue from the Shopify marketplace, you can move with your customer through the Shopify ecosystem, presenting product information at the right time, in the right way.
Dialogue uses AI technology to present your content in the way most likely to make the biggest impact at different states in the customer journey. For instance, on the Homepage, you can create an Instagram Story-like carousel experience, as you can see above.
On the “cart” page, when your customer is ready to checkout, you can show pictures of other products they might like to add to their basket there and then.
With the option to add these items to their basket immediately within the cart, customers can avoid clicking away from the checkout.
2. Simplify the Purchasing Experience
While you’re moving through the purchasing journey with your customer, you should be looking for ways to make the transaction as simple as possible.
Today’s customers expect their online transactions to be as fast and straightforward as possible. It’s up to you to make sure you’re putting user experience first when you design your online store.
Start by making sure your customers can use all the features of your store easily on any device. If your mobile cart abandonment rate is higher than your desktop abandonment rate, the issue could be with responsivity.
Next, make it easy for customers to find the products they need, with a convenient search function, carefully organized product categories, and personalized recommendations of additional items your customers might like, based on the products they see.
3. Reduce Friction in the Checkout
Just as your customers need a simple experience throughout your website to reduce a high cart abandonment rate, they also need the interaction with the checkout page to be as straightforward as possible. Studies show ecommerce companies can even increase conversion rates by around 30%, just by optimizing the checkout.
Make your checkout pages more straightforward by eliminating as many form fields as possible. You can also offer features like:
- Automatic address lookup and automatic form fill for existing customers.
- The ability to change product details within the checkout.
- Multiple modes of payment, including “Buy Now Pay Later.”
- Guest checkout options (for people who don’t want to create an account)
You could even suggest additional products your customers might have forgotten based on what they were previously looking within the cart. This is a great way to increase order value too.
4. Make Pricing Transparent
The last thing your customer wants is to get most of the way through the buying process, just to discover at the last minute there’s an extra fee they weren’t aware of. One of the most common reasons a customer abandons their cart, is they’re shocked by shipping fees.
You can reduce your risk of cart abandonment and improve your chances of sales by making the shipping cost evident on the product page.
Another option is to simply offer free shipping as part of the deal. You may need to increase the price of your products slightly to accommodate for the costs of delivery, but this can help to improve your chances of conversions.
If shipping everything for free doesn’t make sense, offer free shipping on orders over a certain price. This could increase your customer lifetime value by encouraging users to buy more. You can advise customers to spend “x amount” more on personalized product suggestions to get shipping for free.
5. Leverage Social Proof
Customers can often feel anxious when buying products from companies online, particularly when they’re not familiar with the brand. Social proof is an excellent way to minimize this issue. With a star rating or reviews from existing customers on your product pages, you show your customers that your items are authentic and trustworthy.
Depending on how much reassurance your customers need, you might even implement reviews and testimonials in a carousel on the checkout page.
Additional forms of social proof can include expert endorsements, or trust seals on the checkout page, designed to show your customers that they can trust you to keep their information safe, and deliver their products on time.
Learning how to improve cart abandonment rate
Shopping cart abandonment can be a serious issue for many companies. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce your risk of losing customers. From leveraging the power of social proof in your checkout, to making sure you stay with your customers every step of the way, the right strategy should improve your conversions, and your customer lifetime value.
Don’t forget, whenever you implement a new strategy for reducing shopping cart abandonment, make sure you track the results in your Shopify analytics. This way, you’ll know which strategies to double down on in future.
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