Shopping cart abandonment is the most heartbreaking of conversion killers. it is also a fertile place to increase the performance of your website.
Shopping cart abandonment is like cholesterol: There is a good kind and a bad kind. For each there is a strategy for reducing the impact of abandonment on your business.
Good abandoners leave because they aren’t done with their shopping process.
Bad abandoners leave because you surprised them or didn’t provide the information they were looking for.
But it’s 2020, and the number of smartphone dependent shoppers has grown considerably. Thus, we will add one more layer of complexity to the shopping cart abandonment recovery strategy: desktop vs mobile visitors. Why it happens and what to do about it.
Cart Abandonment Rate Formula
The shopping cart abandonment rate formula is quite an easy Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to calculate. Divide the total number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created within the same period. Subtract the resulting number from one and multiply by 100 to get the abandonment rate percentage.
Abandonment Rate Calculation Example
- Total number of completed purchases: 335
- Total number of shopping carts created: 500
- Cart abandonment rate: ((500-335) / 500) * 100 = 33%
Definitely not a bad shopping cart abandonment rate. Only 33 out of 100 customers are leaving their carts behind. Do you experience high add to cart but low conversion rates? Keep reading.
Top 7 Cart Conversion Optimization Solutions to Eliminate the Causes of Cart Abandonment.
The difference between mobile and desktop visitors
“A growing share of Americans now use smartphones as their primary means of online access at home. Today roughly one-in-five American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have traditional home broadband service.”
Source: Surveys conducted 2013-2019. Data for each year based on a pooled analysis of all surveys containing broadband and smartphone questions fielded during that year.
Traditionally, the desktop computer is a research tool and the smartphone is a dopamine delivery system.
These are two very different uses of internet attached computers.
For someone on a desktop, adding your product to their cart is the end of a journey. For the mobile user, the add to cart is to see how it will feel.
For a growing segment of our population, this is changing. For more and more people, the smartphone is their only source for communication, research, and dopamine. Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among younger adults, non-whites and lower-income Americans.
For this reason, we are not going to assume that most mobile visitors are “just shopping.” We are going to look at the causes of checkout abandonment and provide a playbook for eliminating them.
There are also consumers who only buy your products on desktop computers. They would not even think to pick up their phone and buy what you sell.
Let’s dive into how to reduce shopping cart abandonment and improve conversions.
Why do Shoppers Abandon the Checkout Process?
Just as science has identified “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol,” there are “good” and “bad” abandoners among your website’s visitors.
The Good Abandoners
Good abandoners leave you as part of their process. They are walking all the way to the edge of buying, even though they are not ready to buy. They are imagining purchasing from you. Yet, they fully intend to continue comparing your offering to alternatives when they start the checkout process.
And they may be hoping you’ll hang on to their selections for when they return. Wish lists and persistent shopping carts are a big help to these abandoners. More on that later.
The challenge is to get them to come back and buy when they are done. We cover some of the strategies for retargeting this visitor later on this article.
The Bad Abandoners
Bad abandoners leave you because they didn’t like what they saw after they got started. These abandoners are bad for you because they are lost opportunities. They were going to buy, but you chased them away with your checkout process. – Read more
