The high rate of abandoned carts is one of the most relevant problems for an e-commerce site. Statistics from several sources agree that the practice of abandoned shopping carts affects about 70 percent of transactions.
How to measure the rate of Cart Abandonment
The percentage of abandoned carts compared to transactions is measurable, and is an essential element in examining the causes and planning subsequent remarketing actions. Among the possibilities is that offered by Google Analytics. Simply add a “property” to the administrator account and enter the e-commerce property. On “Target description” you choose the option “Destination”, in “Target detail” you must indicate the URL of the page that appears when an order is confirmed. In the Passages indication, first the URL of the shopping cart page, and in the second one the URL of the payment page. You will then get a graph that indicates the number of sessions in which you have only visited the site, the number of sessions with products added to the cart and finally the sessions that after reaching the checkout have not completed the payment.
The first data in the report, relating respectively to visits to the site and consultations of the product sheets, are indicative of the site’s ability to generate conversions. One wonders what the inefficiency of an e-commerce site in generating conversions is due to. An unsatisfactory relationship between overall visits and product visualization is due to Web Design and content organization. The reduction of the steps that the user must take to reach the product must be the main objective for those who design and build the website. The effectiveness of an e-commerce website depends not only on issues related to the price of products and related services but also on the navigability and overall User Experience.
Why do users leave the carts
There are various reasons for this, but the most recent statistics are mainly from the American market:
- In the first place of the causes, for more than 60% of the cases, unexpected shipping costs are highlighted. So it seems that users simulate the purchase, testing the cart to know the total costs of the transaction. In the evaluation of users, the purchase through e-commerce sites is mainly based on the convenience of the overall costs, as well as other elements, such as delivery times, etc..
- The second most frequent cause, which affects about 20% of online purchases, is related to the need to create an account to conclude the purchase. In this case, the need to make boring steps, wait for the email confirmation of registration, provide data deemed non-essential, such as date of birth or mobile phone number, negatively affects the UX and discourages the purchase.
- In third place in reports on the causes of abandoned shopping carts are reservations about the security of payment systems. Users are very careful to the security of online transactions and like systems considered more secure, such as those offered by intermediaries, such as Paypal, avoiding payment systems that are not transparent, such as the recharge of prepaid cards – the classic Postepay – or that require longer times, such as bank transfers.
- With regard to the abandoned shopping cart, in the fourth place of the causes of this behavior, statistics also record the Check-Out methods, perceived in some cases as too long and complex. This is generally a failure to optimize the purchase funnel, which consists of too many steps to complete the transaction.
In addition to technical reasons, which concern the lack of clarity of the information provided to users, which forces them to fill the shopping cart to identify the total price or delivery date, other aspects also affect the phenomenon of abandonment of shopping carts in e-commerce sites. These are issues that affect the user’s intentions. In many cases, in fact, you do not necessarily want to buy the product immediately, but you simply make simulations and comparisons between costs.
How to reduce the cart abandonment rate
Some actions can be taken to generate conversions even from abandoned carts: these are on-site interventions or remarketing.
Interventions on the e-commerce website
Often the trolleys are used as a kind of quotes, thus indicating to the site operator that the price indications of the services related to the transaction are not clearly indicated at an early stage of the purchase. The difficulty in finding the products on the site in a few steps is also an element that does not favour conversion. In order to reduce this habit, it is a good idea to test the purchase funnel, also using collaborators or family members, to assess whether everything is proposed in a User-Friendly perspective and whether the data presented in the product sheets are perceived as sufficient to generate conversions. The user registration and checkout phases should be analysed in order to make them more immediate, simple and clear. Finally, the use of customer support systems through Live Chat and Chatbot should be evaluated in order to provide the potential customer with the information they need through automated interaction or managed by chat partners.
Abandoned Cart and Email Remarketing
For some time now, and effectively, we have been adopting Marketing Automation actions, through remarketing by e-mail. It is an action that offers results if it is fast and contains a proposal able to convince the user to conclude the purchase. So the contents of the email should highlight some advantages, such as reduced or free shipping costs, or a Next Best Action, or a bundled product at low cost, or finally the possibility of receiving a coupon with a significant discount, to be used on the next purchase.
ByTek Marketing creates e-commerce sites optimized to reduce the phenomenon of abandoned shopping carts and improve the conversion rate.
