What it is and how can you improve the customer experience?

Just a thought experiment: what would it be like to have a real-world shopping experience that was sometimes similar to an online one? To be able to enter a store, put all the products you want to buy in a basket, and then decide not to buy them. Sure, if you run an online store, you are aware that “shopping cart abandonment” occurs when a visitor wants to buy one or more products from your site, adds them to the cart, but then leaves the store page without completing the transaction. As a result, the products are added to the shopping cart but remain unpaid and are classified as “abandoned.” Even if it may not appear to be a big deal for an e-commerce site, when you consider how much money you could lose, you will reconsider this situation.

One of the most essential indicators you can use to track your online business is the shopping cart abandonment rate. Furthermore, a high dropout rate suggests that the user is uninterested in completing the checkout process.

How is this rate calculated?

This report will show the percentage of users who visit the website and intend to buy a product but do not complete the purchase. The basket abandonment rate is calculated by dividing the total number of completed purchases by the total number of initiated transactions. The obtained result is subtracted from 1 and then multiplied by 100 to determine the dropout rate.

Shopping cart abandonment rate = [1- (total number of completed purchases / total number of baskets created)] x 100%

According to a post on the GPeC blog, the average number of abandoned baskets in 2020 was 69 percent. Returning to the above-mentioned imagination exercise, this means confronting the following situation. 10 customers enter your store, load their shopping carts, and proceed to the cash register. Now, imagine that 7 of the 10 customers leave the store empty-handed, leaving the basket behind.

As a result of understanding why customers give up and abandon products, you can improve their shopping experience and convert more browsers into buyers.

  • Delivery time and cost

For many buyers, delivery is a major issue, and they prefer free shipping. If a product takes too long to reach the recipient, some buyers will abandon it in the cart in search of a faster option. Furthermore, buyers dislike surprises, so when the delivery cost is revealed at the end of the check-out process, they cancel the order. According to Statista data, about a quarter of buyers abandon carts if transportation costs are not clearly and timely displayed.

  • Poor user experience on the website

It is important to consider how users first interact with your online store platform. The overall site experience has an impact on the purchase decision. The fact that the site frequently crashes or has major errors prevents users from accessing the products. Poor navigation leads to abandonment of the purchase because it does not allow you to reach the items easily and intuitively you want to buy.

  • The site is not mobile-friendly

Since more people are shopping on their mobile devices, the mobile user experience is an important factor to consider when lowering your e-commerce cart’s dropout rate. As previously stated, the rate of abandonment of the mobile shopping cart is exorbitant. Mobile users will abandon sites that are not optimized, don’t work properly, and don’t load quickly – even before they reach your shopping cart.

  • Targeted ads are required

Cookies are your friend when it comes to recovering your cart. These are small data files containing (mostly) anonymous information about where visitors were on your site and what they viewed. You can upload this data to ad networks like Google Ads and Facebook, so that when people visit a completely different site, they see ads for the products they left behind. You can also use retargeting via email.

What steps do you need to take to address these issues?

  • Deliver quickly and at a low cost

You can meet customer expectations by providing low-cost delivery and 2-day shipping options.

Working with an e-fulfillment provider is one way to ensure that delivery is affordable and quick for your customers. Instead of shipping all your orders, you will save time and money for business development.

Simplify works with Innoship, a company that optimizes interactions between online stores and couriers, lowering courier costs by up to 25% and increasing delivery performance by up to 15% through dynamic order allocation. This allows you to give a great delivery experience for your customers, which leads to happier customers, better reviews, and increased conversions.

  • Optimize your website for an engaging user experience

When users enter your store’s website, try to categorize them; for example, when they interact with your site for the first time, you can ask them to select the area they are most interested in. You should also think about tailoring your browsing and search based on the products you are interested in. You can also hide the articles they are not interested in. Amazon does just that. When you visit the Amazon page, the items you are interested in and like appear, increasing your chances of purchasing them. Thus, the entire online customer experience with the website, whether accessed via desktop or mobile, is truly relevant for the purchase process.

Every time a visitor returns to the store’s website, they should feel more confident that they understand how everything works. As a result, it is a good idea to optimize your site navigation and search to make it easier for customers to find your products.

  • Enhance the website’s mobile version

More and more e-commerce businesses are registering product sales directly from mobile devices, which means your store must also work well in this version. Another thing to keep in mind is to look for technical errors, especially at the checkout.

Remember that anything that interferes with a visitor’s shopping experience will turn them off and cause them to look elsewhere. As a result, the website of your online store should be personalized and relevant to each buyer, and it should function properly on all major web browsers.

Having a mobile-optimized website is now a “must”; the entire shopping experience must be perfectly represented on mobile if you want to reduce cart abandonment. This means that you should pay attention to the site’s speed (a loading time of more than 3 seconds will drive away visitors), use mobile navigation, and allow people to reach and enlarge products, allowing them to interact with the site faster and more easily.

  • Personalizing Retargeted Ads

Basic retargeting is useful for returning potential customers to the website of an e-commerce store. Targeting relevant advertising to people who have already visited your site and segmenting your audience can result in a ROI of over 1,300 percent.

In a retargeted ad, for example, instead of showing a general ad that promotes your online store, the recommendation would be to include exactly the product that a person added to the shopping cart before dropping it.

Conclusion

Recovering your basket can be quite simple if you identify and fix the problems. You can also save a lot of money because the cost of recovering a basket is usually much lower than the cost of purchasing a new buyer.

Based on online consumer behavioral indices, online businesses should make significant improvements in the way they interact with their customers, developing a more relevant and personalized engagement, in a single channel or across multiple channels.