Shopping Cart Abandonment

Imagine you are an owner of a beauty products online store like Nykaa. A customer visits your E-commerce website to buy a Foundation and a Concealer. The customer finds the desired products on your website and adds them to the cart as well but she drops out of the process of making the payment for the products which means that even though she started the checkout process, she doesn't complete the purchase process. This is Shopping Cart Abandonment where a potential buyer of your product abandons your product. The abandoned products are the ones that make their way to the cart but do not make their way through the transaction process.

The shopping cart abandonment rate is calculated by dividing the total number of completed transactions by the total number of transactions that were initiated. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate basically gives the retailers an idea about the percentage of users who change their minds after adding the items to the cart and abandon them. If your e-commerce website has a high abandonment rate, it could mean that your website offers a poor user experience. One should always try to minimize the Shopping Cart Abandonment rate of their website as much as possible to boost sales and increase revenue.

Now being the owner of an online store, it is very important for you to know why your customers are abandoning your products i.e you must know why shopping cart abandonment is happening to your website. 

Why are your customers abandoning your Shopping Cart?

Even though every E-commerce website is different, there are some reasons that lead to Shopping Cart Abandonment for every E-commerce website :

Lack of Trust - Even though the world has switched to making digital payments for every purchase, there are still some people who are afraid of making online transactions and providing information about their credit and debit cards to any website. This can be one of the reasons why customers abandon your products because they do not trust your website with their sensitive information. It is very important that you improve the conversions of your website and build the trust of your customers via social proof and by building a strong brand name. You can also offer a return policy to your customers to win their trust.

High shipping costs - Most of the customers abandon shopping carts when they get to know how much their order totals to with the shipping charges. Offering free shipping promos can solve this problem for your customers.

Complexity - The online shoppers of today have a short attention span and will abandon the checkout flow if it is too complex or time-consuming. You can avoid this by making the checkout process as easy and painless as possible. 

Lack of payment options - Limited payment options can make your customers abandon the shopping cart i.e when the customers do not find their preferred payment option, their intent to make the purchase often changes.  

Technical problems - The technology is always susceptible to technical issues and glitches. It is important that you keep a check on the analytics of your website and ensure that the checkout process has no show-stopping bugs.

Customers can abandon the shopping carts on your website for a lot of reasons. However, you can always use A/B testing to reduce shopping cart abandonment on your website. A/B testing software basically allows you to easily make changes to your site with the help of a visual editor and by splitting the traffic on your website.