Abandoned eCommerce carts? Here’s what to do.

Who knew? One of the places where you’re losing out on potential revenue can be boosted with automated processes to help your company win back lost profit.

The sooner you’re able to mitigate abandoned cart issues, the bigger the advantage you’ll have over the competition. Research suggests that approximately 80 percent of all carts are abandoned. Clearly there’s a huge opportunity to improve this figure by devising ways to work around abandonment.

Most eCommerce sellers are painfully aware of their stats when it comes to the number of carts abandoned each day or week. What they often don’t know is what to do about it. As a team of problem solvers, we love the opportunity to share our tips on preventing abandoned carts in the first place, and how—with a little work upfront—eCommerce sellers can utilize abandoned cart email offers to save them tons of time and money later on.

eCommerce Tips for Turning Around Your Abandoned Cart Situation

1. USE A “ONE-PAGE” CHECKOUT

There’s often a ton of information you need from customers to be able to sell and send them products; the average number of steps in a checkout process is 5. Rather than having your customers click through arrows upon arrows and wait for pages to load, offer them a simple, accordion-style checkout page.

2. OFFER A GUEST CHECKOUT TO APPEASE NEW CUSTOMERS

35 percent of users who abandoned their carts did so because they didn’t want to create an account. Some businesses use logins to keep track of customer purchases, offer rewards, etc, but sometimes customers just don’t want to go through that hassle. By providing users with a guest checkout option, you are still able to get your customers’ emails, and you also help guarantee the sale by offering them a shorter process.

3. ACCEPT MULTIPLE PAYMENT OPTIONS

To make things even easier for your customer, you can offer a plethora of payment options at your checkout. If you only accept traditional credit cards, you may be limiting your customer base. Increasingly, users are wanting to pay with platforms like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Affirm and Apple Pay. The more you meet your customers where they’re most comfortable, the fewer reasons you give them to say “no”.

4. OFFER FREE SHIPPING

A recent study found that 43 percent of shoppers abandoned carts because they didn’t anticipate that the shipping costs would be so high. Offering free shipping is a quick way to remedy this. If the cost is too prohibitive to do that for all items, consider offering free shipping one time, or once customers have hit a certain price threshold in their carts. A 2014 study suggests that as many as 58 percent of shoppers in the United States will add extra items to their carts in order to get free shipping. That’s not just better for your conversion rate, it’s also awesome for your bottom line.

5. SEND A DISCOUNT CODE OR FREE SHIPPING CODE IN AN ABANDONED CART REMINDER EMAIL

As a general point, all good abandoned cart email campaigns should include the following: an initial reminder, a discount or free shipping code, and then a final reminder. Did you notice the order of messages? The discount comes second, not first. Many eCommerce specialists are now pointing out that some customers are “trained” to expect discounts right away. If your first email is a simple reminder, it may encourage them to finalize their purchase without holding out hope for a final discount. But, by including a discount in an email after your initial reminder, you’ll help account for the “61% of abandoned cart customers who leave because of final price.”

SEND AN INITIAL CART REMINDER

Sometimes a quick, simple reminder is all it takes to nudge an order. Depending on the product, for some customers, just seeing a picture of the product again can entice them into completing their purchase.

SEND A DISCOUNT OR FREE SHIPPING CODE

As mentioned above, the goal is to not make it to this step. However, that being said, some customers will hold out due to cost. You can add a sense of urgency to the purchase by making your discount code available for a certain time period only.

SEND A FINAL REMINDER

Offer your would-be shopper one final reminder either the day before or the day of their discount code expiring. You should also offer your customer a space to answer any questions they may have. While the majority of your shoppers may abandon carts due to price, there may be another reason behind some decisions to hold off on hitting “Order Now”—maybe they need more info about your products or are concerned about your return policy. Link to a customer representative number, chat, or email to help your team win these hesitant buyers over.

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