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10 Reasons Why Customers Abandon their Carts and Ways on How to Prevent It

It is inarguably disappointing when an online customer visits your online shop, adds a ton of products to the cart, and yet ultimately leaves without purchasing anything. If you notice an increase in the incidence of cart abandonment, it’s high time to take proactive action and find ways to prevent them. You are not alone, up to 70% of eCommerce retailers encounter cart abandonment, which ultimately pulls down traffic and conversions on their sites as well.

Learning about consumer behavior will help you identify the reasons why you are losing sales and help you perform the necessary changes, so your site enjoys high conversion sites again. The holidays are just around the corner and there is no better time to learn about measures on how to deal with cart abandonment than today.

But before we give you all the remedy to the disheartening issue that is cart abandonment, let’s take a look at how to calculate shopping cart abandonment percentage. By discovering the cart abandonment figure of your eCommerce site, it becomes rather easy to mitigate the problem and improve revenues altogether.

To calculate this figure, simply divide the total number of successful purchases by the number of created carts, and then subtract from 1. Once you learn your cart abandonment rates, it becomes easy to identify where actual abandonments occur, hence making it easier to create strategies to reduce this issue.

Here are the top ten reasons why your online carts are being abandoned by customers:

1. High Additional Costs

reasons-why-customers-abandon-carts-ways-prevent high cost

Additional costs, including taxes, shipping, and other miscellaneous fees make customers rethink their purchase. In most cases, customers add items to cart so they can have view the final total. Once they see the fees that are added on top of their actual purchase, they decide whether to proceed to abandon cart.

Fix: Give your customers the total upfront costs, including shipping costs, specifics on what taxes are applied, and other fees they are required to cover to complete the purchase. Make sure these additional costs are shown on the product detail page. You can do this by asking customers for their zip code. Customers who are less surprised by their final total are more likely to proceed with the online purchase.

2. Forced Account Creation

It’s a bad move to force your users to create an account to successfully add items to a shopping cart. This strategy ultimately breaks the online purchase cycle as it adds a step, a tedious activity for many customers, and is most likely to turn them away from your site.

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Fix: offer a guest checkout option. Never force account creations as most customers are averse to receiving additional mails on their inbox. If you want to send out emails for marketing purposes, you may collect all these pertinent data after successful purchase.

3. Complicated Checkout Process

A long and complicated checkout process is one of the main reasons why customers abandon their virtual shopping cart. Additional steps and form fields impede the user from processing their purchase. Customers shop online because of speed and convenience. If you deliver a complex checkout process, you are essentially reducing the quality of their overall experience.

Fix: reduce the steps by minimizing data entry. Optimize the checkout by making it simple, quick, and easy to accomplish. It’s highly recommended to set up an auto-save option so that users who initially abandon their shopping cart can simply proceed with a simpler checkout process when they decide to return.

4. Website No Optimized for Mobile Shopping

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Make sure that your ecommerce site is optimized for mobile devices, too. Bear in mind that over 50% of online purchases are completed using a mobile device, it’s a smart move to make your ecommerce site mobile friendly, too.

Fix: Create a site design that is optimized for mobile devices. Create a responsive website that is compatible for both desktop and mobile users. Standardize your shopping cart and checkout design across all devices so users can familiarize themselves buying across all types of devices.

5. Security Issues

Customers are meticulous when it comes to providing their financial details and personal information online. They expect ecommerce sites to establish tight security protocols when processing payments online.

Fix: Adhere to PCI compliance guidelines to safely store credit card details and verify transactions. Establish a high-quality fraud management system that can detect and prevent fraudulent activities on your ecommerce site. It’s also recommended to showcase trust seals throughout the checkout process to let customers know that their information is safe and secure.

6. Limited Shipping Options and Slow Delivery Time

Fast delivery is one of the major selling points of an amazing online shopping experience. Customers expect to be with several shipping options, so they can pick one that suits their needs and guarantee prompt delivery.

Fix: Provide your customers with a variety of shipping options, and the ability to customize their shipping details. They should be given the opportunity to set their preferred delivery times and choose between a few delivery providers, letting them get the experience they prefer.

7. For Browsing and Research Purposes

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In some cases, people who are on your ecommerce site are simply browsing and conducting their own product research. Part of their research involves adding items to the shopping cart. This gives them the opportunity to compare final costs between your site competitors. However smart these customers are, most of them make the mistake of abandoning their carts altogether.

Fix: This is challenging to manage, since it’s impossible to limit access to your website down to guaranteed customers only. You can reduce cart abandonment in relation to this issue by giving your customers enough product information. By doing this, they are less likely to add items to their cart.

8. Better Pricing on Competing Ecommerce Sites

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One of the nice things about shopping online is that customers enjoy the ultimate freedom of window shopping. To get the best deals, customers always browse and compare between sites. If they find a better deal elsewhere, they will abandon their previous shopping carts and ultimately go to the site that offers a better deal than yours.

Fix: Present your customers with competitive pricing, so they end up choosing to buy from your ecommerce site. Providing better service, faster shipping, and more can help you get more customers, too. Make sure to be updated on the pricing of your competition and always use a price point that challenges your competitors as well.

9. Limited Methods of Payment

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Your customer successfully filled out all forms and even selected their preferred shipping option, and not it’s time to pay. Unfortunately, some of your customers do not have a credit card, and there are no other options that enable them to pay online. Customers will most assuredly abandon cart and go to a site that offers other payment options.

Fix: Check the most popular payment options in countries you’re selling your goods to. Add PayPal, since most North American customers prefer using this payment gateway system. In china, customers typically pay using WeChat. Other payment options that you may need to include are Google Pay, Apple Pay, and other major credit cards, too. If you want your site to be more user friendly, try looking into options that automatically save the payment and shipping details of customers, such as PayPal, Amazon Checkout, and Visa Checkout. This option will save your customers time, since at least 90% of the form has already been completed.

10. Excessive Upselling

reasons-why-customers-abandon-carts-ways-prevent upselling

Upselling and cross-selling are useful tools since they help increase sales and average order value. The downside is that these strategies may also overwhelm customers or distract them from pushing through the original purchase.

Fix: Be careful when cross-selling goods to customers. It may be wise to test abandonment and upselling analytics first to have a better understanding and success in cross-selling other related products without worrying about losing customers altogether.

There are many solutions that you can implement on your eCommerce website that can help reduce cart abandonment significantly. Always assess your cart abandonment rate and slowly introduce solutions to ensure that you are delivering the best online shopping experience to your customers.

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