As an eCommerce brand owner, it can be frustrating when customers abandoned their shopping carts on your site. It leaves a lot of potential revenue left on the table and you’re left wondering why they didn’t complete their transaction.
If you don’t have an effective method to recover those abandoned carts. You reduce the profitability of your online store sales.
There is a tremendous opportunity in eCommerce to reduce abandoned carts. The average abandoned cart rate is about 72%!
Even capturing a small portion of those sales can have a great impact. Especially if you have a high average order rate.
Let’s discuss some ways you can reduce abandoned carts on Shopify.
What Are Abandoned Carts?
First, let’s get clear about what an abandoned cart is: abandon carts are when customers are shopping, and add items to their shopping bag or cart. But leave your site before finishing their purchase. So when you find yourself all excited by seeing lots of filled carts but lack of sales. Most likely your customers have left their carts behind to do something else.
So why is this a problem?
Why Shopping Cart Abandonment Is A Problem
Abandoned carts account for a huge percentage of online store traffic. When you have the average cart abandonment rate over 70%. There is a lot of revenue store owners miss out on. As a luxury brand owner with high-price point products. Those numbers can add up quickly.
So when you have interested customers, they are your most engaged. Meaning they are more likely to purchase than someone who doesn’t understand your brand.
Where Can You Find Your Abandoned Cart Rate?
In order to know your abandoned cart rate on Shopify. You’ll need to do some calculations to understand where your online store stands.
How to Calculate Your Shopify’s Stores Abandoned Cart Rate
Pull out your handy tools, some paper, and a pen. Or you can just use a calculator. Here is how you figure out your abandoned cart rate.
(added to cart sessions) – sessions converted)/(added to cart sessions) = abandoned cart rate
When you use this formula just be sure to change your date range to 90 days or a custom range. So you have enough data for an accurate rate determination.
How to track abandoned cart rate in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is great for tracking the health of your online store. Fortunately, with some additional settings, you can track your abandoned cart rate in GA.
Step 1 | Set Up A New Goal
Start by setting up a new goal inside of Google Analytics go to Admin > Goals > New Goal
Step 2 | Define Your Goal
Select Template > Place an order (under revenue) then click continue
Step 3 | Give Your Goal A Description
Google Analytics will automatically default information into the description. So click “continue” if you don’t want to change anything.
Step 4 | Add Goals Details
The goal details are going to be the page we are tracking, for example,
www.storename.com/checkout
Step 5 | Set Up Your Funnel
Think about all the steps that someone takes to complete within your store. Then map out that journey below. Here is an example:
Step 6 | View Your Abandoned Cart Rate
You’ll need to wait at least 24 hours before you will see data within your funnel.
To access your funnel data on the left side, click Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization. Make sure that you have selected the goal for your viewing from the goal drop box at the top of the statistics page.
Once you do, you’ll see something similar to the information down below.
Top 5 Reasons for Abandoned Carts
According to Baynard, the top 5 reasons for abandoned carts are:
- Extra costs too high (shipping, taxes, and fees)
- The site asked the customer to create an account
- Delivery times were too slow
- Too long/complicated checkout process
- Didn’t trust the site with their credit card information
As you can see, there are quite a few areas that can be improved.
How to Reduce Abandoned Carts
So how can you reduce abandoned carts? There are quite a few methods to help you lower your abandoned cart rate number.
Be Transparent About Shipping Expectations
I’ve been guilty of this, adding items to my cart to find out the total. It was only because the website didn’t make it clear on shipping and other potential fees.
If you aren’t as transparent as possible with additional fees, then you will experience an increase in abandoned carts.
Customers want to know what they are paying for, and it’s not always logical.
People will pay $20 for free shipping but will hesitate to pay $14 with $5 shipping. I know it doesn’t sense, but it’s true and I’ve done it too!
It’s 100% pricing psychology, which we must chat about at a later time.
Your customers want to feel like they are making a smart buying decision. You must support them by being transparent about shipping and other potential fees.
Simplify The Checkout Process
The checkout experience for customers needs to be simple. If you ask customers a million questions at checkout, they will most likely feel frustrated, overwhelmed, and leave.
When someone has made it to your checkout page. They have made a serious decision to buy, this isn’t the chance for you to learn all the details about them.
Instead, here is what you could do:
- Ask for only necessary information.
- Don’t require registration to checkout.
- Allow for guest checkout.
This will help make the checkout process smoother and quicker. Reducing the chances that your customers will change their minds.
Once you’ve won over your new customer with an exceptional experience. Later as you build more trust with your customer, you can gather additional details.
Ensure Your Shopify Website Is Optimized For Mobile
Evaluate your analytics, do you have a lot of shoppers that come to your website on mobile? More so than desktop? If so, you’ll want to ensure your Shopify website works great on mobile.
Look at your website from your customer’s eyes, is your site easy to use on mobile? Look for potential barriers that could prevent customers from completing a transaction.
Some distractions you should look for are:
- Chat boxes that take up the entire screen.
- Pop up’s happening before your customer has looked at your products.
- Hard to read information or product photos they can not easily scroll through.
Tip: only have the most important information visible on mobile to help your customers decide.
Remember, everything doesn’t have to be displayed on mobile. You can reserve detailed information for desktop viewers, as smaller screens have less visual real estate.
Think about your customers’ frame of mind as they are shopping. Most likely when your customers are viewing on mobile they are making quick decisions. So the fewer distractions there are, the quicker they can decide and get to checkout.
A well-optimized eCommerce website designed for mobile can reduce the decision-making time. This leads to customers making it to the checkout page quicker.
Establish Trust Within Your eCommerce Store
Customers want to know that their information is safe if they decide to purchase from your online store. Fortunately, there are various ways you can establish trust within your online store.
Here are just a few:
Have consistent branding
Your brand usually makes the first impression before your business does. Customers instantly decide a business’s credibility through their appearance. When your brand isn’t cohesive or set’s the right tone. Customers begin to lose confidence that their information will be safe. Establish brand guidelines for your business then consistently use your branding throughout your website.
Branding is more than just the visual aspect of your business. Branding also involves ensuring that your business tone, message and vision are in alignment with the type of customers you’d like to attract.
Use professional photography
Product photography is an essential element of your online store. Your photos need to articulate and convey important information about your products. Customers aren’t able to instantly touch & experience your products. So your photos need to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you to give an accurate perception of your products.
Some tips when it comes to professional photos
- Ensure that they are consistently well lit.
- Take photo shots of multiple angles.
- Make sure your photos consistently flow well together.
Professional photos will help increase trust within your business and help your customers make better buying decisions.
Have well-written website copy
Words have so much power when guiding people around your website. Think about your ideal customers when they land on various pages of your website. Think about if your website copy achieves the following.
- Do the words presented encourage them to take action?
- Does your copy easily convey what you’re selling and for whom?
- Do people know what to do next?
One way you can validate if your website copy is doing its job is if your customers are taking more action. Open up your Google Analytics account and look at your bounce rate. Is it high on pages that it should be lower? If so, take some time to analyze what could be improved on the page to increase better conversions.
For additional insights on how you can build more trust within your online store.
Showcase Product Reviews
What’s the first thing you do when you decide to purchase a product? You look for reviews of past shoppers!
Reviews give your customers an opportunity to get real-life experiences from past shoppers.
Fabulous reviews can really support potential customers’ decisions to make a purchase.
Keep your reviews in an easy-to-find location where customers can read through and find the information they can relate to. Strive to have detailed reviews from your past customers, not just general feedback like:
“Oh, this was great”
BUT
“I was in the market for X and I was so happy to discover (this product). It has made my day-to-day life so much easier. Definitely, will keep this in stock plus (company name) service has been amazing!”
Which of those reviews would make your buying decision easier?
Great reviews inspire trust and can help support people in making a buying decision.
Provide An Excellent eCommerce Website Experience
On par with a great mobile experience and a simplified checkout process. Your website experience needs to be in alignment with the behaviors of your shoppers.
The best way to have a website experience that translates to sales. Is to understand your ideal customers and design a site around them.
It’s one of the essential & vital elements I establish with clients here at The May Creative. In order for us to create a premium Shopify website experience that converts. By diving helping you to have a website strategy that ties in with your customers and what inspires them to buy.
An easy-to-navigate online store makes shopping a breeze. Your customers will have varying needs from those that already know what they want to those that want to explore.
Your Shopify website should be designed & developed to meet your customers at various levels.
Have An Abandoned Cart Email Strategy
Sending an abandoned cart email to customers who have left their carts can help you recover sales. Abandoned cart emails can help you recover part of the 72% of abandoned sales. Ensure that you craft an email that encourages your customers to finish their purchases.
Keep the email simple and with a clear call to action. You can use an email marketing tool like Klaviyo (ref link) to help you create and automate the process. That sends customers who left their cart an email to finish the transaction.
It’s a pleasant way to remind customers they were interested in purchasing some items. Plus, it allows you to wow them with your amazing customer service. By making sure your emails are personalized to how they prefer to shop through eCommerce personalization.
Klaviyo uses data science to help you craft effective emails that convert. You can set up a personalized email that also includes recommended addons, up-sells, cross-sells, etc.
Let’s dive into some examples of abandoned cart emails.
Abandoned Cart Email Examples
One great thing about Klaviyo is that they provide you with some starter email templates to help you create your own abandoned cart emails.
Of course, sometimes it’s just great to have some additional examples of what an abandoned cart email can look like.
Kate Spade Abandoned Cart Email Example
Let’s start with Kate Spade, one of my favorite brands.
Here is what’s great about the Kate Spade abandoned cart email.
- You can instantly see that the email is designed with Kate Spade’s branding. This creates more brand connections and trust with their customers.
- They highlight a benefit of the customer completing their purchase. “Shipping & returns are always free. So no harm in going for it.” This helps ease any potential hesitation in completing the purchase because of shipping or a poor fit.
- Kate Spade’s email also provides additional support if a question arises.
- Lastly, they encourage the shopper to look at what’s new in case they decided against the original item they were looking at.
What could you add to your abandoned cart email to help customers feel more reassured that they should complete their transaction?
Could it be a reminder of complimentary shipping above X amount?
Sephora Abandoned Cart Email Example
Another example of an abandoned cart email is Sephora
It makes sense that Sephora wants its customers to grab all the goodies they are interested in. One key component of Sephora’s cart abandonment strategy is to create a sense of urgency.
You could implement this if the product(s) you are selling has a high sell-out rate. This will help encourage those customers who are on the fence to take action or they might miss out.
Think about what important information your ideal customer needs to know in order to encourage them to complete their purchase.
Conclusion
Now that you understand the importance of reducing abandoned carts and how they can help you win back thousands in sales.
If you haven’t developed your own abandoned cart strategy, right now is a great time to do so. If you have already put measures in place. Periodically check in to see how your emails are performing. Then make adjustments as necessary.
Email marketing plays a vital role in helping you to amplify your eCommerce business. As an eCommerce business owner, email is one of the best ways to bring the in-store experience to a digital space. Remember your customers want to feel as if they are getting personalized attention. Take the extra step to ensure you have a proper email marketing series in place. Can be a great way to differentiate your brand in the market.
I know email marketing isn’t one of the sexy sides of running a business but it makes a huge difference. Where you can build brand awareness via social media. Email is where you can truly build a deeper connection with your audience and get direct access to their experiences.
