Do you ever visit the supermarket and witness someone leaving their full shopping trolley in the middle of the aisle? You may have, but it’s quite rare because they don’t have many distractions in that environment causing them to do so. In an ideal world customers visit your e-commerce website, view the products that they wish to purchase and checkout – all without the need to leave their seat. Unfortunately, when it comes to the real-world customers can get distracted at any point during their shopping experience.
Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is the term used when a customer has added products to their cart on your e-commerce website but fail to checkout and complete their order. Cart abandonment can happen for a number of reasons such as the postman knocked on the door, they were in the middle of cooking tea, or the dog needed walking etc.
Just because your customer left their cart, doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to purchase your products from your store.
Preventing Cart Abandonment
So, how do we prevent cart abandonment? As mentioned before, your customer is likely wanting to purchase from you – after all they’ve taken an action to visit your store. But sometimes there is a reason for a customer abandoning their cart:
- Website performance – your website could be too slow and therefore you’ve lost your customers interest, so they shop elsewhere.
- Pricing – your products price could be too high and your customer leaves your website looking for your product elsewhere, but cheaper.
- Delivery fees – you add excessive delivery fees (or poor delivery methods) which deters your customer from purchasing.
- Slow checkout – the amount of time it takes to enter all their data during checkout could be excessive and therefore they leave.
- Payment methods – you don’t offer a wide range of payments (such as PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay). If you want to find out more about online payment providers, click here.
The list could be endless, and you may not be able to identify if there is an issue causing increased cart abandonment. If you are concerned that your website isn’t performing as expected – get in touch and we’ll be happy to see if we can help.
Recovering Abandoned Carts
All is not lost! If you have checked that your website is performing as expected, then there are a few ways to bring your customers back. After all, if you’re paying for ads then another attempt is definitely worth it.
- Retargeting Ads – these kind of advertisements specifically target customers that have visited your website, added something to their cart but not completed their purchase. They are likely to bring back the customers that answered the door to the postman and their products are waiting for them when they return.
- Email Marketing – if you already have permission to contact your customer then you could send them a reminder email after a period of time.
With retargeting we advise creating a retargeting strategy, this is because you could first target them with an email reminding them what they have left behind, then if this doesn’t work you could send them another email with a discount code to help them across the line and purchase.
If you’re unsure about how you can recover your abandoned carts, then get in touch.
Conclusion
We can’t always help when customers get distracted from their shopping experience when mixing online shopping and day to day life. What we can do is ensure that the shopping experience is as refined as possible to make it easy for your customers to make a purchase. We’d advise you to take a walk in your customers shoes and see if you can find everything you need – or better still ask someone you know for feedback about the experience.
If you are concerned that you have a high cart abandonment rate – try retargeting them with advertisements or emails. Or get in touch for a friendly discussion.
