Use These Facts About Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates to Beat the Odds

If we shopped the way in grocery stores that we do in online stores, retailers everywhere would be in trouble.

Imagine it: you head to your local market and fill your cart with everything on your list. Just as you’re about to head to check out, though, you get a text message from a friend, and you walk out of the store.

While this might seem unlikely, it’s exactly what happens all the time in the digital world.

We shop for a while, add some items to our cart, get right to checkout and then, for whatever reason, abort the sale and move on. It’s a problem known as “cart abandonment” and it currently costs online retailers between $2-$4 trillion annually.

Fortunately, there are a few things ecommerce companies can do to lessen shopping cart abandonment. While it’s impossible to guard against it entirely, you can take action to limit it as much as possible.

The first step is understanding why and how frequently it happens.

Fortunately, there are a few things ecommerce companies can do to lessen shopping cart abandonment. While it’s impossible to guard against it entirely, you can take action to limit it as much as possible. It’s worth implementing some of the strategies outlined in this article as soon as you can – especially in the lead up to major shopping holidays, such as Black Friday and Christmas.

Are you looking for facts about shopping cart abandonment rates? We’ve got the ultimate list for you.

Cart Abandonment Rates, by the Numbers

How often does shopping cart abandonment happen? Here are the stats:

• 61% of consumers leave a transaction thanks to additional fees, like extra shipping costs
• 37% of people who abandon carts do so just because they’re shopping online and not ready to purchase
• 36% of cart abandoners have found a better price somewhere else
• 32% abandon carts because the price is too high
• 25% of shoppers abandon carts because the merchant website was difficult to navigate, while 24% abandon carts because the site crashed
• 61% of consumers won’t purchase from a company with a bad return policy
• 22% won’t purchase from you if your shipping costs are stated too late, such as not until checkout
• Abandonment increases by 75% and loyalty decreases by 50% when a website is slow

5 Ways to Decrease Cart Abandonment

Now that you understand what causes shopping cart abandonment, what can you do about it? Here are some common cart abandonment problems and what you can do to solve them.

1. Make Your Site Safe and Secure

Security is critical in the world of ecommerce, especially in the post-GDPR world. Today, 35% of customers will abandon an ecommerce site if it doesn’t feature a security badge. With this in mind, it’s essential to build trust through your transaction forms.

One way to do this is to add security logos alongside your transaction forms.

Seeing any of these logos gives customers an immediate sense of trust that their financial information will be protected and kept safe. It’s also a great way to boost sales, as 61% of customers report having abandoned an online transaction because trust logos were absent.

Beyond adding trust logos, it’s also essential to actually keep your site safe and secure for customers, and take steps necessary to ensure their financial information is protected throughout the transaction and beyond.

2. Make Navigation Effortless

Remember: 25% of shoppers abandon carts because the merchant website was difficult to navigate. To avoid losing these customers, be sure your site is as easy as possible to navigate. One critical part of this is making it effortless for customers to navigate between your store and their shopping cart.

As a general rule, your customer should be able to hop around your website without ever touching the back button. The more realistic this is, the more likely customers are to convert.

Bonus points: Send cart abandonment emails to remind customers who did leave your site that they left their items behind.

3. Offer Multiple Shipping Options

Today, 24% of customers will abandon a cart if no delivery information is offered, while about 15% will leave if the shipping options don’t suit their needs. Luckily, this is an easy abandonment trigger to avoid. Be sure you’re catering to all of your customers by offering multiple shipping options.

As a general rule, you should offer a free and economy shipping option, as well as at least one expedited option. Some merchants even choose to provide overnight shipping for customers who want it.

Check out how Glossier does this in the screenshot above.

4. State Shipping Costs in Advance

Customers hate being surprised at checkout with high shipping costs. In fact, costs that are too high or stated too late are some of the main reasons people abandon their carts! To avoid this, it’s essential to state your shipping costs upfront, as early in the checkout process as possible.

Backcountry is one website that does this very well – making shipping costs (or the lack thereof) evident throughout checkout and plastering free shipping offers all over item pages. Notice the security badge below the checkout box, as well.

If you are going to make customers pay for shipping, be sure to let them know what they can expect right away. This increases trust and, ergo, conversions.

5. Make Returns Easy

Even though you don’t want customers to return the products they’ve purchased online, returns are inevitable. With this in mind, you need to ensure that returns are streamlined and simple when they do happen. Remember that upwards of 80% of customers won’t buy from a store with a poor returns policy, and that a whopping 66% read your return policy before making a purchase.

That said, take a note from Amazon and Zappos and offer free returns, prepaid labels, and a digital returns dashboard.

Need Even More Stats?

Shopping cart abandonment is a fact of life for ecommerce merchants. That said, though, there are things you can do to decrease your bounce rates and keep people moving through your sales funnel.

Once you understand the facts about cart abandonment rates, you can take steps to address the most common customer concerns and navigate around them. This, in turn, allows you to boost your sales and keep your ecommerce store moving forward for years to come.

For even more stats on how you can reduce abandonment and increase sales, take a look at this infographic we’ve created below.