According to a comprehensive study of 37 highly-trafficked eCommerce platforms by The Baymard Institute, the rate of shopping cart abandonment can be pegged at about ~69 percent. This means as many as 7 out of 10 shoppers take the time to add items to a cart, but then leave before checking out.
For online merchants and eCommerce store owners, regardless of the platform (Magento, Shopify, Shopify plus, BigCommerce, Woocommerce, hybris etc.) looking at their conversion rates, seeing cart abandonment rates this high is likely to set off alarm bells. At face value, it means your site isn’t doing a very good job of converting. Below the surface, many more red flags start to arise—including questions about your site’s layout, the value being presented in your products, search and find ability and more.
Before panicking, eCommerce merchants need to look at what a cart abandonment is and why they happen. In understanding these two important details, it’s possible to correct key variables and lower your cart abandonment rate, while simultaneously raising your conversion rate.
What is an Abandoned Cart?
Simply put, an abandoned cart is a cart with items that a customer has walked away from. From an eCommerce store owner’s perspective, however, there are two ways of looking at the true definition of abandoned carts:
- First, you can look at it in terms of lost revenue: the potential profit value of the items added to a cart that never reached check out.
- Second, cart abandonment can be defined as a breakdown in the sales funnel: where a customer actively decided to leave the purchase environment.
Both definitions illustrate how impactful abandoned carts are to your business. Solving the problem of turning abandoned carts into conversions means understanding the opportunities they present.
Why do Abandoned Carts Happen?
Understanding why shoppers take the time to load a cart, then leave it, is the key to fixing gaps in your conversion process and recouping the lost revenue of those carts. According to a survey and statistics provided by Statista, shoppers chose to abandon their carts for 6 chiefly identified reasons:
- Presented with unexpected costs at checkout (56%)
- Not actually serious about making a purchase (37%)
- Found a more affordable price elsewhere (36%)
- Total cost of cart was too expensive at checkout (32%)
- Decided not to buy products (26%)
- Website navigation was too complicated (25%)
There’s immense data to be gleaned from these simple numbers by comparing them to the concepts of an abandoned cart. For example: overwhelmingly, cost is a factor in making the decision to abandon a cart. Reason numbers 1, 3 and 4 (and to some extent 5) outline cost as a problem. Compare this to the idea that an abandoned cart is the sum of its lost revenue. The pieces fit together to give you a better idea of where your business might be coming up short in the conversion game.
Additional Reasons for Cart Abandonment Include:
Removing Conversion Barriers
It recognizing why people are walking away from their carts, eCommerce managers can better understand where tweaks and improvements could be made to their sales process. Be it price adjustments, web design, conversion capture points or something else, understanding is the key to fixing.
No matter how you look at cart abandonment — as lost revenue, process breakdowns, dissatisfied customers or by another metric—addressing the problem is critical in optimizing your eCommerce. Pay attention to potential gaps in your on-page conversion pipeline to see where carts might be falling through the cracks.
Who is Datacrushers?
Datacrushers is a revenue discovery platform and global leader in site-wide revenue recovery and acceleration.
Disrupting the status-quo, Datacrushers is fundamentally changing the way online merchants use real shopper analytics to boost revenues and improve client lifetime value. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Datacrushers is a technology and platform agnostic tool designed for rapid go to market deployment across any language and currency.
Datacrushers enables revenue growth by the use machine learning and artificial intelligence to mine real user, site and product data into actionable analytics to drive highly targeted and personalized multichannel campaigns both on and off-site.
We’d love to show you how to identify and address your site-wide revenue. Make sure to schedule a 1-1 walkthrough today with a revenue discovery specialist today!
