What Are The Best Practices To Reduce Cart Abandonment Rates On An Ecommerce Store?

First of all, you need to know that a certain abandoned cart rate is normal. The exact percentage depends on the business of course, but usually around 10% is normal (100 add to carts, 10 purchases).

With Shopify you can use abandoned cart emails, which are sent automatically to the customer after an hour, a day, three days or whatever. I actually got a decent amount of carts recovered with this.

Plus, be absolutely transparent in your shipping times, prices etc. Many people abandon because they feel that something is missing. Maybe you didn't put in your shipping times transparently or they are not fully sure about the cost. Put in FAQ and give all the options customer might want.

Last but not least, use as many payment options as possible. This is actually the number one reasons for abandoned carts.

Also check my video about Add To Carts / Purchase relationship:

There are a number of things you can do to help with abandonment.

• Firstly and a quite simple does your cart design match your website?
  
• Are you adding anything to their cart. It's common place in some industries but can have a jarring effect if a customer adds a 9.99 product and the cart shows 24.99 due to forced add ons.
  
• The next tip goes against one of favourite principals but it works. Remove upsells and cross sells from the cart page. Don't try and sell them anything else just let them check out. There is an art to upsells and just sticking a product on the cart page can be a traffic leak.
  
• Remove all exit routes. On my site when you click to cart I've disabled the menu and there are no hyperlinks on the page other than to go back and buy. If someone is on the cart page they've made a microcommitment help then follow that through by removing distractions
  
• Include testimonials, social proof and a value proposition on the cart. Remind them why they are buying. Reassure them others have done the same.
  
• Include trust icons and a badge for your guarantee (if you offer one). Be careful with trust icons as they can actually put doubt into your customers mind.
  
• You can also use scarcity if it's suitable to your offer. If I'm doing a flash sale I will include a count down timer and a remaining stock count down. You can do something similar with regular items with 'your cart will expire in x minutes'. Cinemas do this well.
  
• Remove any fields that don't need to be included. Make the checkout page as effortless as possible
  
• If you are using PayPal there are ways to keep them on your site to pay. I'd also consider accepting Amazon pay.

Away from these make sure you've got Google analytics installed and look to see where the abandonment is happening.

I've mentioned this before but conversation rate is really a number of smaller conversion.

Product to add to cart.
Add to cart to cart page.
Cart to check out.
Checkout to payment.

Where are you loosing people?

If you are selling a single product why not miss out the cart page altogether.

With your analytics you can also see if you are loosing people from a particular platform. It might reveal you have an issue with mobile which might require a site redesign.

To get people back who've added to cart look to invest in abandoned cart technology. Nearly every platform has some way of letting you do this.

I run a 7 day abandonment sequence. I contact them within a hour to let them know there are items left in their cart. Similar email the next day then I offer discounts on the next few emails before finally throwing a hail Mary and offering then a different product (normally something that's bought with the original item they looked at).

I'd also look at retargetting to compliment the abandoned cart campaign and a separate campaign for those that didn't get as far as giving you an email addresses.

I consistently recover around 20% of my abandoned carts but more importantly have decreased the amount of abandonments.

Not surprised that stat came from somewhere like PayPal - it's almost as if they have a dog in this fight.

And I'm not talking about $5 products either but hey as long as your happy.

Hi Ali,

What's your site, I'll take a look at your current strategy?

On site messages are great when triggered on exit intent or idle time, as long as their subtle and attractive.

Also what's your follow up strategy? So if a visitor is intent on abandoning when do you send an email, and what kind of conversion are you seeing from those?