Your eCommerce Store’s Biggest Enemy: The Shopping Cart Abandonment

Did you know the majority of your online store visitors add items to their shopping cart but never finish their order? This is the shopping cart abandonment, one of your most serious sales foes. And it’s eating up your revenue every single day.

To measure the percentage of sales that were not finalized, there is the shopping cart abandonment rate. It examines the share of people who have added items in the shopping cart on your website, but have not gone through the checkout process. And this is how the abandonment happens. Usually the selected items remain in the shopping cart forever – or until the user session expires. Both cases are bad news for online retailers.

But how big of a problem shopping cart abandonment really is? What causes it and what can you do about it? Let’s tackle these hot online store topics and check out some practical solutions.

The average shopping cart abandonment rate

Data from various researches concludes that the average cart abandonment rate is around 67%. The Baymard Study, which is based on 27 different research sources, has recorded different values whose average is 67.91%. Some reports even cite a rate of up to 80%. Needless to say, that’s a lot!

A simple calculation will show you that  if you have, say, 10 orders daily, there are another 20 people each day who want to make a purchase from your online store but bounce for unknown reasons. This also means that you could be making two thirds more revenue if you could identify and tackle the cart abandonment problem. That’s a huge missing on profit for your eCommerce store.

Why, oh why, is cart abandonment happening?

While there is some mysterious air about the shopping cart abandonment, there are usually a few common reasons why people do not finalize a purchase. Often buyers use their shopping cart as a wish list for your online store, but then get distracted and forget to go back to the cart. If there is no cart abandonment email in place, people might never come back to make the purchase.

In other cases, people start the checkout process, but then as they are going through it, a doubt comes in if they actually want the item. Another common case is that they get surprised by the shipping costs, delivery or payment methods and decide not to buy anything. Other reasons include:

• Customers have found a better deal in a different online store
• They had problems with the website navigation or performance
• They experienced technical problems with the payment process or started doubting the security of the payment (for example, if security logos were not in place)

Tracking the shopping cart abandonment rate of your eCommerce store

Learning how to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate of your store means you need to first start tracking and analyzing it. You can use a variety of website analytics tools to explore it. Setting it up is fairly simple. Here are a few options:

1. If your preferred analytics software supports metrics or conversion rates, the formula is pretty simple: 100% – (unique people who placed orders / unique people who added items to their shopping cart)%
2. If your analytics software only supports Funnels, add a simple funnel with two steps:  Added Item to Shopping Cart and Placed Order. To calculate the shopping cart abandonment rate, simply subtract the conversion rate from 100%.
3. If you’re using Metrilo, then you have it easy. The shopping cart abandonment rate is automatically calculated for you on your dashboard. Plus, you can see how it changes over time, along with many other cool metrics and useful tools.

Fighting shopping cart abandonment

As with any enemy, it’s essential to know how and why shopping cart abandonment happens. Understanding your store visitors’ buying logic and reasons to bounce will help you greatly to take effective steps and rightfully increase your sales and revenue. That’s why there are awesome tracking and analytics tools like Metrilo to help you along the way.

If you’d like to know more about combating your store’s abandonment rate, simply get in touch.

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