Reasons and Solutions as to Why Ecommerce Cart Abandonment Occurs
Steve Mills
June 14, 2024

CART ABANDONMENT IS A RE-OCCURRING PROBLEM AS TIME AND TECHNOLOGY GO ON.

Did you know, the average ecommerce store loses over 75% of its sales to cart abandonment? (*) It is one of the biggest struggles to overcome in ecommerce today. There are a number of reasons as to why, and Bray has the solutions to prevent cart abandonment from happening in your business:

HIDDEN SHIPPING COSTS

Unexpected shipping costs are the key reason to why visitors to your website leave without purchasing. Most consumers leave their cart due to extra costs: 61% reported leaving a transaction due to an extra cost such as shipping fees. (*)

No one wants to pay an unreasonable fee on top of buying an item, especially when it comes unexpectedly. It can cause customers to regret purchasing from you and they may not choose to do so in the future when they are aware of the hidden costs.

To ensure you keep consumers sweet, make sure to make it clear just how much it will cost to ship from the get-go. Transparency is desired by every digital shopper and is essential in attracting future visitors. Free shipping wouldn’t go amiss – or offering a deal when a customer orders a particular amount of products at a certain cost will encourage more purchases at ease.

THE FEAR OF GDPR AND OTHER SECURITY WOES

Concerns over payment security can have a serious effect on consumer behaviour. Worrying flaws such as design defects, missing or low-quality images, and certainly no SSL certificate.

There are many ways you can increase trust on your site. Having a regular presence on social media can assure customers that you are trustworthy to purchase from. Putting testimonials from previous customers along with product reviews and providing easily found contact details are all factors that allow consumers to give their full trust in your brand.

Most people like to feel safe, especially with so many risks so easily accessible across the internet. 35% of individuals will abandon a site if it does not appear to have a security badge. (*)

TOO MANY CLICKS

Living in such a time-poor generation, you can’t afford to make checkouts any more difficult than needed. Having to fill in unnecessary information or clicking through to the checkout more than three times is quickly going to become tedious.

Make sure to focus on key information only to minimise inconvenience. Streamlining your entire site will make a huge difference in the user experience. Time is money!

NO ROOM FOR A ROBUST RETURNS POLICY

Ecommerce will always have an underlying struggle because you can’t see exactly what you’re getting. However, some return policies can make things even worse for a consumer. Strict/advanced return policies are not approved. 80% of shoppers will not make a purchase unless there is a hassle-free return policy. (*)

Offer free returns within a 30 day period. Giving your consumers enough time to get a refund is important, which, in turn, will encourage them to purchase from you in the future.

WEBSITE WORRIES

Website errors and speed will all affect user experience when purchasing products.

Focusing on your customers want and needs are essential for success. Keeping an eye on your website and how it performs in general and most importantly in busy periods is important. Keeping everything up to date will ensure your site doesn’t become slow and unusable. This should be tested across all platforms, especially web and mobile.

CART ABANDONMENT ISN’T ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE

Some shoppers aren’t really shopping. Nearly 40% of surveyed consumers responded that they abandoned their shopping cart because they had been just browsing in the first place. (*)

A lot of consumers like to see what each ecommerce store has to offer. Online consumer behaviour evolves on a regular basis. Researching multiple prices, shipping and offers are just one of the shopping habits customers will conduct.

Adding items to a cart to later refer to has become a regular occurrence. It is not unheard of that customers will often exit a store with the intention of coming back. Many will, in fact, return a number of times before making a purchase.

While there isn’t one solution to solve the problem of cart abandonment, businesses can always do better.

The entire reason for reducing cart abandonment is to recover any lost sales. If shoppers are evaluating certain products on price, all it takes is a simple solution to implement a price match guarantee to ensure customers purchase from you above competitors.

While you can not completely get rid of cart abandonment, there are plenty of solutions to ensure it doesn’t happen often.

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