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Every online shop owner has one major concern about his ecommerce business and that is – What is it that makes the customers come to the website, add items to the cart but does not complete the purchase? Therefore it is vital to find a solution to this crucial problem if he wants to excel his ecommerce website. There are different cart abandonment solutions available in the market which we will discuss in our post today.
The latest shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers lies between 60% and 80% with an average percentage of 68.80% as per 2016 November statistics. This means two-thirds of the time, customers add items to their shopping cart and leaves the site without buying those items. This implies around 650 out of 1000 customers do not convert, thus online retailers lose out on a lot of opportunities.
The above infographic shows 2016 statistics for cart abandonment as per location and devices. The Average Cart Abandonment rate is 68.8 % and the Average Conversion Rate via emails is 17.6%. This is a critical issue globally and mostly over mobile devices with conversion rate too low. This means online sales are being affected drastically which in turn reduces the overall business revenue.
Thus its an alarm to online shop owners to look into this area and find out why shopping carts are getting abandoned so frequently. After a lot of research, the main reasons why cart abandonment takes place in today’s time is as follows:
- Customers are required to Create an Account before purchase
- Abandonment due to Unexpected Shipping Costs
- Long and Confusing Checkout Processes
- Aggressive Upselling during transaction
- Better pricing on other sites
- Prices are shown in foreign currency
- Website collapsed and shows slow response
- Abandonment due to Payment Security Doubts
Click here to get a detailed description on each of these above reasons which is available in one of our earlier post.
Thus this crucial problem of online business needs to be dealt with and for the same, online shop owners can take action in 2 possible ways:
Before Cart Abandonment:
Try and prevent visitors from cart abandonment before they add items to the cart. This can be achieved by providing an amazing experience to the customers right from the start of their shopping journey. This can be achieved in the following ways:
Design of the website: This implies you should look into a few factors like design of the website, website usability and user-friendliness of the website.
Clear pictures: Most important thing for this is to have clear pictures displayed for each products along with description that thoroughly explains the product.
Display of security logos: Displaying security logos is another important aspect for curbing cart abandonment because it will create a sense of security in the minds of the visitors while making a purchase.
Price guarantees and refunds: Mentioning about price guarantees and refunds on the site very clearly can makes the visitors want to purchase the products and complete their transaction.
After Cart Abandonment:
The online retailers will always want to have their customers not leave their purchase incomplete and hence takes appropriate actions for the same. But on instances where cart abandonment takes place even after taking precautionary measures, they would want to retrieve their lost customers and avoid situations like this to occur in future. Click here to read our latest guest post on resolving cart abandonment.
Apart from this, there are various tools which can be used to help track the reasons for customers opting out of purchasing their selected items. It can also help online shop owners to make alterations to the shopping experience on their website which in turn helps to stop losing out on ample of opportunities to increase their online sales.
7 basic tools to avoid shopping cart abandonment:
1. Rejoiner – Sending emails for recovery of lost sales
It is a very simple concept where the Rejoiner plugin needs to be downloaded and integrated into your online store. It allows you to set-up reminder emails and also personalise them. You can also customise the number of days after cart abandonment takes place to send these personalised emails. There is a provision to also track the performance of their emails and its effectiveness and can be used on most of the popular ecommerce platforms.
2. Qualaroo – Helps make a survey to identify the reason why visitors are leaving
It is very important to know the reason why customers are leaving the website without making a purchase. For this Qualaroo acts as an expert to survey the visitors to identify their problems and make an educated guess as to what are they looking for.
Possible answers to main problems that affect the online sales are achieved using this tool which can be related to the following issues:
- High exits on particular pages
- Determine what they do not appreciate on the site
- Why are visitors stuck on particular product page for long
- Cart abandonment by mobile visitors
- Trust issues associated with the website
- Cross-selling and up-selling on the website
- Checking out issues after selecting items
Thus this helps online retailers to increase their shopping cart conversion by decreasing cart abandonment after above such problems are solved.
3. CrazyEgg – It shows exactly where visitors travelled on the site and what is clicked
This is the most effective tool among the list as it helps you to determine exactly what and where visitors have clicked even if they did not click on any links. It also shows what parts of the page were clicked by the customers. This works even better than google analytics where you are only informed of what links were followed by the prospects.
There are many key areas of problem that needs to be identified to avoid possible cart abandonment and this tool makes that extremely easy to happen. It helps to identify which part of the page is getting most attention by the visitors, showcases things that are not clickable on the website which should be made accessible. If there are multiple links on the page then this tool will let you know which link was clicked more by the visitors. You can also identify visitors scroll on the page and how far he went on that page with ease.
4. Olark – Helps to determine what visitors do not like on the website or on a particular page
This tool uses a Live chat facility to determine what visitors do not appreciate on the site and what made the user experience inappropriate. This tool actually gets engaged to the prospect to find out their grievances which increases a sense of ‘We care’ in the minds of the customer.
Many questions are asked to the customers like which pages on the website do not serve the purpose and makes the users drop out, which products need to be reviewed for better description, what do they like and dislike on the website, what actions should be taken to provide a hassle-free experience to the customers etc. Thus this tool provides online retailers a roadmap on which they should focuss their attention to avoid cart abandonment.
5. Yotpo – This helps you to deal with reviews and testimonials on the site socially
As we all know how important reviews and testimonials are on a website. They actually help influence visitors and if dealt with perfection, it can be a boon to ecommerce business. This is exactly what Yopto tool is doing, it sends reminder emails to the customers after whatever number of days of cart abandonment that has been preselected along with a section where visitors are asked to write product reviews or opinions about the website as a whole.
You can also provide discount codes to customers on giving an honest review that encourage them to ultimately make a purchase.
Also, it integrates these reviews with Twitter and Facebook by providing different widgets to display them on the website as well. It has a dashboard that helps to track the effectiveness of the campaign.
6. Ethnio – This provides a pop-up survey to determine the usability problems
This tool basically adds a pop-up survey to the website and asks the visitor to participate in the usability test. The tool also allows you to customise the survey as per the objective like visitor information, website or specific product information. You can encourage customers to take this survey by providing them with some incentives or discounts.
This has proved to be very successful because there are customers who like to get involved and appreciate a kind of relationship and a sense that they are important.
7. ClickTale – This acts as an in-page web analytics tool that measures movement of mouse and keystrokes
As the name suggests, this tool provides the tale of each and every mouse clicks and keystrokes of the customers who visited the website. This tool enables you to have the same experience as that of the visitor when he visited the website. It is similar to CrazyEgg tool that measures the clicks on the website along with an enhancement to also measure the movement of mouse and keystrokes.
The success of this tool lies in 2 main features which is as follows:
a. Visitor’s screen can be viewed – You can view the screen of the visitor when they are browsing your website. Thus this helps to understand where the customers are struggling, which pages make them linger on for long or what they like and dislike on the website.
b. Website – Visitor interaction – There are many different reports that are provided by this tool that helps you to determine the website-visitor interaction. These include Drop report, Time report, Blank field report, Re-fill report and Form Analytics.
This helps you to understand how customers are interacting with your website. For instance, the Drop report shows the percentage of customers that left the site while filling in the online form. Thus you know that you need to fix the form fields to increase the conversion rate on your site.
Conclusion:
These are some of the ecommerce tools in the market that can help you to curb the problem of shopping cart abandonment. It is very essential to act fast on this issue and find a robust solution for the same because losing out on potential sales in future can be very harmful to the overall progress of ecommerce business.
There are many other tools which can also help to solve the issue of cart abandonment and are available on other platforms like Appy Pie’s App Builder, Shopify, Magento etc which we will discuss later in our other posts.
Very interesting article. Out of the 8 reasons for cart abandonment cited here, I have experienced 3 of the most annoying things for my own reasons: being required to create an account before purchase, unexpected high shipping costs, and payment security.
Before purchase, I also want to know and be assured there’s a price guarantee and money-back or refund.
I’m sure the 7 tools presented will help online sellers improved their sales and reduce the number of cart being abandoned at checkout.