Managing Abandoned Carts – Why Consumers Ditch Their Carts And How To Reclaim Those Sales

The holiday shopping season is upon us and the reality is that most online shopping carts are being abandoned. Even though more people will be shopping in the coming months leading up to the holidays, all efforts to get the customer to checkout will ultimately be in vain if a shopper doesn’t buy what they have in their shopping cart. The good news is that there are many ways to optimize checkout for a positive checkout experience for a customer, reduce cart abandonment, and close the deal on a sale. I recently spoke to Dor Mizrachi, Product Manager for the Wix ecommerce platform, to discuss how businesses can improve their checkout success to drive fewer abandoned carts and more sales.

Gary Drenik: Tell me about you and your role at Wix.

Dor Mizrachi: I’ve been with Wix for 2 years and I work on the ecommerce team. The Wix eCommerce platform gives businesses all the professional tools and services they need to sell everything from products to services online and in-store. Wix users can build and sell their e-commerce business across multiple distribution channels, including their own web and mobile storefronts, social media channels, leading e-commerce marketplaces, and physical retail locations.

drenik: What are the most common reasons people abandon their shopping carts?

Mizrachi: In today’s digital retail environment, approximately two-thirds of all shopping carts are abandoned. There are several reasons why consumers abandon their shopping carts.

• User Friction: Whether they are forced to create an account instead of having the option to check out as a guest, the checkout form is not optimized or localized, a lack of convenient or clear shipping options; Difficulty finding a coupon code; insufficient right of return; not enough payment options. For example, according to a new survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics, a flexible return policy is very important to nearly half (49.4%) of US adult shoppers, and free shipping is very important to about 62% of them. Too much friction or a lack of information on these aspects of the buying process often leads to cart abandonment.

• Performance (page faults/crashes/timeouts): Slow websites can cause cart abandonment. For example, a website that loads in 1 second has a three times higher conversion rate than a website that loads in 5 seconds. If a consumer clicks on an item they are interested in and it takes a while to load, there is a high chance that they will give up and move to another website.
• Shopping behavior: Nowadays, consumers use their carts for different purposes. Not all online shoppers use their shopping cart to make a purchase. Many online shoppers today use the shopping cart as a wish list, collecting items they want but are unlikely to buy. Others use the shopping cart to collect items they think they want and then use the shopping cart as “memory” to compare them to, or price against, other items they want to buy compare from another website. The current state of the US economy is also affecting household spending, with nearly a quarter (24%) of shoppers doing more comparative shopping online, according to a recent survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics. These consumers typically don’t plan to make it to the checkout and can be grouped as browsing abandonment.

drenik: Successful online stores are no strangers to re-targeting their website visitors – what tactics do these stores use that set them apart from others on the web?

Mizrachi: First of all, it’s important to convert unknown visitors (consumers who the business can’t identify because the visitor didn’t log into an account, fill out a form, or click on marketing materials) into known visitors or store members. This can be done, for example, by explaining to visitors the importance of signing up as a store member, whether to receive discounts, receive pre-sale notifications for new items, or for other reasons. In some cases, even if the consumer does not make a purchase, the business may have the option to send abandoned cart emails. These emails can be automatically delivered to your contacts when they have left items in their shopping cart.

If you already have someone’s email address, you can go the route of sending abandoned cart emails. These emails can be automatically delivered to your contacts when they have left items in their shopping cart. It’s not uncommon for these types of emails to include discount codes as well. About half of the people who open them complete their purchase. Open rates are also high at 41%, click-through rates land at around 9.5%, and ROI is up to 1,300%. Digital retailers are now also integrating text messaging for abandoned carts, which has become handy as 81% of consumers are now opting into at least one brand’s text messaging marketing program.

drenik: You mentioned checkout optimization earlier. Can you explain why this is an important element in reducing cart abandonment?

Mizrachi: Checkout optimization is an important part of the purchase funnel. Once shoppers decide to shop on your site, it’s crucial to make their experience as smooth as possible. The checkout form should be straightforward and simple. Policies, order summaries, and the total price breakdown should be easy for the customer to understand. Where appropriate, automatic form filling settings and faster form filling can help prevent customers from getting frustrated and giving up halfway to checkout. It’s also important to show the buyer a clear and friendly error message when something goes wrong or is missing.

In addition, it is important to know the payment preferences of customers. The checkout form should offer a variety of payment options such as: B. Credit cards, Apple Pay, Buy-Now-Pay-Later or account-to-account payments. The retailer will likely see the customer abandoning the purchase if they cannot find their preferred payment method.

Localizing the checkout form with the local language, currency, and currency formats helps ensure the process is clear. It’s important to be transparent about taxes, shipping and handling costs, and deadlines. These additional fees are often added at the end of the purchase and can surprise shoppers if they don’t know about them before checkout. The clearer you are about taxes, shipping costs, and when the product will be delivered, the greater the chance of a successful checkout.

One of the benefits of using a platform rather than building an eCommerce website from scratch is that the business owner can benefit from and contribute to the data the platform has collected about their industry and potential customers to streamline a merchant’s checkout. An example would be if a business owner uses a Wix checkout page, then Wix can use data to optimize the shopping flow and help users improve their conversion rate, or it can help the business owner localize the checkout form and to optimize the pages of the website for mCommerce offer analysis tools to optimize the purchase flow and much more.

drenik: How does establishing a mobile commerce (m-commerce) ecommerce strategy help business owners drive more clicks, taps, and swipes, thereby reducing cart abandonment and increasing sales?

Mizrachi: More digital shoppers will use smartphones instead of desktops to shop, yet mCommerce has the highest cart abandonment rate, with over 80% of all transactions ending in no sale. When it comes to boosting conversion and retention rates on mobile, the same rules apply as on desktop, only increased. The UX and forms should be clean, concise and clear. Everything visible should be essential and serve a purpose. When reviewing and checking out, everything should be clear and visible, and when checking out, the minimum amount of detail should be captured to close the sale. It is important that the website is compatible with all mobile devices (e.g. IOS, Android).

Aside from making the mobile shopping experience seamless for shoppers, retailers can create mCommerce applications and encourage users to download the retailer’s app and shop with special discounts and promotional codes. In addition to saving on customer acquisition costs and increasing customer repeat rates, this also gives retailers the ability to collect data about the shopper and send push notifications to the device, encouraging them to close the sale if they exit the application before checking out to have.

drenik: Dor, I really appreciate you sharing your unique insights into checkout optimization. It’s really interesting to learn more about why online shopping carts are abandoned and your recommendations can really help retailers win back those sales, especially as we get closer to this year’s holiday shopping season. It was my pleasure speaking with you.