Why you should really be measuring shopping cart abandonment rates
We’re all guilty of it, adding countless items to our online shopping basket, getting to checkout and swiftly changing our mind. As a customer, shopping cart abandonment rates aren’t something we probably think about while online shopping, but as a business owner, it’s a lost sale which is incredibly frustrating.
The average online cart abandonment rate worldwide is 88.05 percent1 – quite a hefty number! This blog covers how and where we measure abandonment rates and how we can help reduce these rates, to get your products sold and entice the customer to come back for more.
How to measure abandonment rates
Shopping cart abandonment is a term used in the online business world to describe when clients leave a store’s website after adding products to their basket, but do not complete the transaction. To calculate the percentage of customers that leave the online store empty-handed, divide the total number of successful transactions by the total number of shopping carts, then multiply by 100%.
This is often a large number and can be disheartening to businesses who rely on eCommerce to sell their products and who are not in control of how much can be charged for shipping costs.
When visitors leave your site without buying a product, it can be linked to a bad customer experience. This leads eCommerce businesses to believe that the problem is with their online or mobile experience, whether those issues are website security or unresolved barriers during the buying process. However, apart from shipping costs, the second most common reason why shoppers abandon their cart is due to being asked to create an account. In other words, the longer it takes consumers to complete the checkout process, the more inclined they are to ditch their shopping carts and leave. Monitoring the customer journey from start to finish is an important part of enhancing the user experience. This information can be used to pinpoint technical issues, detect shopper trends, and figure out where your customers are having the greatest difficulty, which coincidentally brings us to how mobile rates are affecting cart abandonment.
Is there a difference in mobile rates due to smaller screens?
The short answer is, yes. It’s a huge issue for shopping cart abandonment rates. In fact, according to recent studies, mobile shopping constitutes 63 percent2 of all online retail sales, and is expected to grow year on year. It’s pretty obvious that a mobile screen is a lot smaller than a desktop screen, which can make online shopping and checkout processes more fiddly and frustrating for the consumer. That’s why making your website mobile friendly is crucial to reducing your abandoned cart rates. Here are a few simple things you can do to make your mobile site more user friendly:
- Use a simple web design that can be viewed on a variety of devices.
- Use bolder font and button dimensions on mobile devices so that your users don’t have to strain in to see your content.
- Minimise redirection, optimise graphics, and improve server response time to boost the performance of your mobile website.
- Allow your mobile customers to purchase without registering and as a guest.
- To make it easy for customers to make purchases, offer a range of payment options. Adding a mobile wallet would be especially beneficial for mobile purchasing because it simplifies and speeds up the payment process.
How Fetchify can help with your shopping cart abandonment rates
Here at Fetchify, our expert teams have a proven track record of helping businesses reduce their basket abandonment rates. Using innovative technology, we have a Address Auto Complete system that you can install into your checkout process, which speeds up address entry with 100 percent correct data every time – resulting in happy (and paying) customers!
Lengthy address inputting is a top issue many customers find the most annoying. Unfortunately, it has to be done, otherwise the point of internet shopping would become obsolete. With Fetchify’s plugin, all a customer has to do is type in the start of their address or post code, and Predictive Intelligent Search delivers address results from as little as four characters. Have a look at one of our fantastic business case studies to see the results for yourself.
1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/457078/category-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/
2 https://shanebarker.com/blog/mobile-shopping-cart/
