How to reduce cart abandonment rate in ecommerce

Sales are hugely important to any ecommerce company. You might have a lot of visitors to your website, and many may even continue on to the checkout process, but if they stop before purchasing, then their visit provides little benefit to your business. 

This article will list a few different ways how to reduce cart abandonment rate and why doing so is essential. The topics we’ll cover include:

• Identifying cart abandonment
• Why cart abandonment happens and why reducing it is important
• How to reduce cart abandonment rate in ecommerce
• Managing sales revenue with Countingup

Most ecommerce sites will have a virtual cart that customers can add items to, so they can purchase multiple items together and review their chosen items before paying. When a customer adds items to their cart but leaves the ecommerce site before completing the checkout process, you would refer to the cart as abandoned. 

To work out the cart abandonment rate for your website, divide the number of completed transactions (i.e. actual purchases) by the number of total transactions. You then deduct that number from one and multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage. The process is described using this formula:

Say you had 500 transactions initiated on your website in one month. This means that 500 visitors to your ecommerce site added items to their cart, and went to the checkout page. Suppose you only have 100 completed transactions, though. This means that of the 500 initiated transactions, only 100 of them led to actual purchases. 

Putting this into the formula we’ve provided would look like this:

Using the formula, you can see that you have a cart abandonment rate of 80%, meaning that only 20% of the transactions initiated on your website turn into sales. 

Using this formula is important because it provides an exact percentage for your cart abandonment rate. It’s much easier to measure your success in this kind of project when you have figures you can refer to.

Put simply, reducing cart abandonment is important because reducing abandonment means boosting your sales. It’s also important because when you attempt to reduce cart abandonment, you’ll likely discover many things about your ecommerce site you could improve. Solving these issues will bring a variety of benefits as well as reducing cart abandonment.

Before you can begin thinking up solutions to your cart abandonment problems, you need to look into why the abandonment happens in the first place. There are tons of possible reasons for this, but we’ll look at some of the most common ones. 

Customers may not be happy if they finish shopping, access the checkout page, and discover they need to pay much more than they expected. Although the extra charges could come from many different sources, they’re frequently things like additional taxes or delivery costs. 

People prefer their shopping experience to be quick and easy. If your checkout process requires people to provide lots of personal or contact information, they might not bother and simply abandon their cart instead.

Registering an account can also cause abandonment because of customers’ privacy concerns. It’s a current social trend to be very aware of your online privacy, and it’s wise to be aware of how these trends can affect your business.

A long checkout process would ask for a lot of unnecessary or complex information. Your website might not require complicated account signup to use the checkout, but if the checkout process itself is difficult, you may still get a high cart abandonment rate. 

High shipping costs can cause cart abandonment. Look into shipping solutions that offer low prices, but you may not want to go straight for the cheapest possible solution. It’s wise to consider the quality of service you can expect and weigh that against the price. Try to use a solution that is affordable but also provides a quality service. 

If you’re unable to reduce delivery costs, state them clearly before a customer accesses the checkout page. Even if a charge isn’t very high, an individual might still abandon their cart simply because the cost was unexpected.

It’s a huge benefit if customers sign up for an account on your ecommerce site, as there are lots of useful marketing strategies you can use if you have their information. Unfortunately, requiring account signup can cause cart abandonment.

One possible solution for this is to make registering for an account optional. If you provide an option to check out as a guest, this can reduce abandonment rates. Don’t remove customer accounts entirely though, as they can be very helpful for both you and your customers.

A more streamlined checkout process means only asking for information that’s necessary for a customer to pay. You can also make checking out easier by allowing users to copy their info into other checkout sections. For instance, try including an option to skip the delivery address section if the delivery and billing address is the same.

When you successfully reduce your website’s cart abandonment rate, you’ll increase your sales and start making more money. This means you might need to put more time into your financial management. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.