Last updated - November 10, 2023
If you run a WooCommerce business, you surely agree that attracting new customers to your website requires a lot of time and money. And if prospective customers abandon their shopping carts without making a purchase, all of that effort would be for nothing.
You lose out on a possible sale every time a customer leaves a cart with merchandise in it on your online store. In order to reduce WooCommerce abandoned cart rates, it is crucial to optimize your website as much as you can. Let’s get started! In this article, we’ll go over certain strategies on how to reduce cart abandonment.
What is Cart Abandonment?
In simple terms, cart abandonment is when a customer visits your website, adds items to the shopping cart, and then leaves the website without proceeding to checkout the items in the shopping cart.
Cart abandonment happens more often than you think, and there are several reasons attributed to it, which we will explore in the below sections. Although cart abandonment may seem to be a trivial problem, it is not! Because more cart abandonment will lead to lesser revenue and fewer repeat customers.
Why is Cart Abandonment a Significant Problem?
Cart abandonment is a widespread problem, even for the biggest online merchants like Amazon, Alibaba, Etsy, etc. Most studies estimate cart abandonment rates to be around 60–70%. This means that the majority of people who visit your eCommerce store never actually complete their purchases.
Simply put, lost potential revenue is the result of abandoned shopping carts. The greater the rate of cart abandonment, the greater the loss to your company. If your cart abandonment rate is comparable to the market average (around 70%), you are losing $700 for every $300 in sales.
No matter what kind of store you operate, many customers may entertain the thought of making a purchase but ultimately decide against it. This ultimately leads to fewer sales and conversion rates. That being said, you should still make an effort to lower your store’s WooCommerce abandoned cart rates. After all, even a small decrease in that proportion can result in significant earnings.
How to Calculate Cart Abandonment Rate?
As a business owner, it is important that you know how to calculate the cart abandonment rate of your eCommerce site. This will help you assess the performance of your business and create strategies to reduce the cart abandonment rate. Here is the formula to calculate the cart abandonment rate.
Here is an example.
Let’s consider the total number of carts initiated as 500 and the total number of purchases as 200. Now, let’s calculate the cart abandonment rate based on the above formula.
Common Reasons for Cart Abandonment
- Price hike – Customers generally do not add items to their cart the first time they visit your eCommerce store; rather, they tend to check the prices of their desired products over a span of two to three revisits. Therefore, when there is a sudden hike in product prices, they tend to abandon the cart.
- High additional costs – This is one of the most common reasons for cart abandonment. Additional costs are those that are levied at the time of checkout, such as delivery charges, taxes, convenience fees, platform fees, parcel charges, etc. If the additional costs are higher than usual, then your customers are most likely to abandon their carts.
- Forceful account creation – More than half of the eCommerce websites force their customers to create an account with them to make a purchase. While this is a good strategy for businesses to reach out to customers with promotional content, most customers do not prefer this and quit their purchase process.
- Longer dispatch and delivery time – In most cases, the estimated dispatch and delivery dates are displayed on the checkout page. And when the delivery date is longer than usual, the carts are abandoned by the customers, as they do not like to wait for too many days for their products to arrive.
- Tedious checkout process – This is one of the most annoying factors that result in cart abandonment. Customers like a simple and straightforward checkout process, and when an eCommerce site’s checkout process is tediously long, the customers refuse to go through the trouble of making the purchase, resulting in cart abandonment.
- Inadequate payment options – With the constant advancement of technology, numerous payment options are being developed to make the payment process simpler and quicker. When an eCommerce site fails to update itself and sticks to traditional payment methods, the chances of cart abandonment are higher.
- The absence of the “Buy Now Pay Later” option – This is an important option that is expected of an eCommerce site by the majority of customers as it reduces the financial strain while making a purchase. It is also the most opted payment option in recent times. Therefore, failure to provide the “Buy Now, Pay Later” option automatically leads to a higher rate of cart abandonment.
- Improper or no return policy – Return policy is a crucial factor in the decision-making process for customers to make a purchase. As a matter of fact, the return policy is one of the primary reasons why customers transitioned from brick-and-mortar storefronts to eCommerce sites. Therefore, no or improper return policy will lead to cart abandonment.
- Poor reviews and ratings – Customer reviews (genuine reviews) play a crucial role for potential customers in making a purchase. It is something that will help them decide whether or not to go for a particular product. Therefore, poor or unsatisfactory reviews will make customers quit the purchase process and thus lead to cart abandonment.
- Slow page loading speed or website performance issues – Though this point may seem like an overkill, website performance, i.e., loading speed is also one of the factors responsible for cart abandonment. We live in a fast-paced world, and a slow and laggy website will frustrate customers into abandoning their cart as they do not want to waste their time waiting for the website to respond.
8 Tips to Reduce Cart Abandonment
Disclose the Full Value of the Shopping Cart Upfront
Ensuring there are no unpleasant shocks is a fantastic strategy to retain your cart abandoners. We’ve already determined that a majority of cart abandonments are caused by unforeseen or hidden costs. You can cut your cart abandonment rate in half if you can get rid of this crucial element.
You might wish to provide all available pricing information on your product pages to avoid this. Customers will be able to compare items from rival companies more quickly as a result.
The buyer won’t be subjected to any additional fees thanks to this technique. However, you still have a good possibility of increasing your average order value with thoughtful and targeted product recommendations.
Allow Cart Checkout Without a User Account
You can also leverage the excellent feature of guest checkout to reduce your cart abandonment rates. The ability to check out without needing to create a user account is appreciated by the majority of first-time consumers. Enforcing user registration may prolong the checkout process and discourage clients who may have reservations about your company or your goods.
When new customers need to input account registration information and confirm their contact information before going back to their cart to make a purchase, they could already be on their way to an alternate site.
Reserving account creation for post-purchase is the most effective technique to streamline checkout while maintaining all of the customers’ information. By doing this, you may easily convert new clients into repeat ones without having to worry about losing money on your initial purchase.
Quicken the Checkout Process
You must reduce as much friction as possible in order to expedite the checkout process. This can entail eliminating pointless pages and paying more attention to navigation (UI/UX) components.
Your checkout process may not be fast enough for the following reasons:
- Your site is asking for information that customers might have provided previously.
- Your site is integrated with slow and laggy payment gateways.
- Your customers are redirected to more than one checkout page.
- Your customers are redirected to a page (mostly an email confirmation page) in a different browser or tab.
One-click purchase and one-page checkout are two options you might want to explore if you want to give your customers the greatest checkout experience possible. Customers can shop with only one click by selecting the “Buy Now” option. After they click, you can direct them to their shopping cart. They can then make adjustments to the products in their cart and finish the purchase process without leaving the page, thanks to one-page checkout.
Build Customers’ Trust Through Trust Seals and Good Customer Reviews
Online buyers are extremely cautious, especially given the prevalence of online scams. It might be fairly difficult to persuade a first-time customer to enter their financial information on your website. By adding trust seals to your WooCommerce store, you can quickly increase visitor trust.
Small badges from financial security compliance services provided by third parties like Stripe, PayPal, and McAfee could serve as trust seals. Or it might just be a straightforward money-back promise, client testimonials, or the number of active users and total downloads. In any case, you may also display any appropriate identifiers, accolades, or certifications.
You might also include social proof on your pages to increase trust. Online customers tend to believe reviews from other users who have already purchased a particular product. Social proof is effective because it makes people feel more at ease about purchasing goods that others have used and recommended.
Use Follow-Up Emails
Despite how well-optimized your checkout process, cart page, and complete website are, some customers will still remove items from their carts. In such cases, sending follow-up emails to remind them of the abandoned cart is a good idea.
A close to 50% open rate and a conversion rate of roughly 2.4% are reported for follow-up emails sent to customers who abandoned their shopping carts. Email is one of the marketing channels whose ROI was rather significant!
If you send your customers up to three of these emails, you’ll receive even greater results. Customers who intended to finish a transaction but got sidetracked may find this to be useful. Of course, you’ll need to focus on crucial elements of email marketing, like perfecting the subject line and substance of your emails. By providing potential substitutes for the item in their basket and designing the email to seem like the cart page on your store, you can increase your conversion rate.
Use Exit-Based Popups
Cart abandonment rates in your store might be reduced with the help of exit-intent or exit-based popups. You’ll need special software that monitors mouse movements on your website to set them up.
The software will automatically launch the popup if the mouse leaves the browser window or tab. According to certain studies, you can use this tactic to recover between 3 and 8% of the purchases from abandoned shopping carts.
The plugin keeps track of essential behavioral patterns, including exit intent. And when necessary, a popup is subsequently displayed using this information.
Provide Multiple Payment Options and Gateways
Offering a variety of payment options is another way to reinforce the idea of a secure online purchase. When a typical online customer feels at ease with one or more of the payment methods offered, they will finish their purchase more quickly.
Nowadays, using credit and debit cards to make internet purchases is a no-brainer. By including a service like Stripe in your WooCommerce store, you may accept credit card payments from several nations. You won’t pay a setup cost for the service, and the only fee is a small portion of each transaction, which is about 2.9%.
However, using only Stripe as your payment gateway is insufficient. Other well-known payment options, such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, may be more comfortable for your clients.
You should incorporate other regional payment methods, such as Venmo for US customers, Paytm for Indian customers, and Paystack for African clients, depending on where your target market is located. Shipping options follow the same logic. Your chances of conversion are higher the more options you provide for shipping carriers to your clients.
Optimize Your Site’s Performance
Site crashes and sluggish web pages not only cost you prospective revenue but also damage the reputation of your brand. Higher bounce rates are a result of slow loading times as well.
A little bit of fun and wit in the error page’s wording might lighten the mood in the rare circumstances of a site breakdown or some downtime. Adding personality to the message or directing the store visitor to other pages or products would also be fantastic.
To achieve minimal latency when users access your site from any location, you can utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or a cache plugin.
Even with these tools in place, you still need to make sure that the images you add to your product pages are small and compressed. In order to reduce cart abandonment to a minimum on your store’s website, having a fully responsive and mobile-friendly design is extremely important.
Conclusion
For eCommerce shops around the world, cart abandonment is a huge problem. You could be missing out on a lot of potential sales if you don’t make an effort to lower the percentage of WooCommerce store visitors who leave items in their shopping carts.
Online shoppers remove items from their shopping carts for a variety of reasons. Regardless of the cause, there are some best practices you can employ to keep your clients interested and persuade them to make that purchase.
