Taylor Simmons 
The eCommerce industry loses $18 billion every year due to cart abandonment, with an average cart abandonment rate of 70%. No matter the size of your business, it cuts into your bottom line significantly.
Here’s why your customers are abandoning their carts, and how to make them come back.
Calculating Cart Abandonment Rate
The average cart abandonment rate is 70%. How can you find what your rate is? Here’s the formula for cart abandonment.
Once you’ve determined your cart abandonment rate, you can compare it to the average rate and see how you – and your business – are faring.
Why Users Abandon Carts
According to a study conducted by Statisa in cooperation with the Baymard Institute, nearly 50% of users abandon a cart because of additional charges, such as taxes and shipping/handling. The same study found that a little over ¼ of customers will abandon their cart when asked to create an account to complete checkout.
Another study determined that about 1 in 5 users will abandon their cart when the checkout process is too long/takes too many steps. While there is no general answer about what the best number of steps for a checkout is, the Baymard Institute determined that the average checkout has 5 to 6 steps. The bigger issue, they note, is the perceived effort, such as the number of fields they need to fill out or the amount of text they see on the checkout page.
Stripe, an online payment processor, has a list of reasons why a user might abandon their cart. This includes site performance issues, lack of trust, and unsatisfactory return policies.
How to Win Them Back
Now you know why users will abandon their carts. So how can you get them to come back, or better yet, stop them from leaving at all? Depending on your store’s biggest issues, here are the best solutions.
They Abandon Carts Because of Additional Costs
If users are leaving their carts because of sticker shock from additional costs, such as shipping and taxes, try transparent pricing. For example, if you have a minimum to reach before you offer free shipping, a bar in the cart that tracks that would be helpful.
They Abandon Carts Because of Forced Account Creation
While it is a good idea to allow customers to make an account with you if they wish, not allowing them to checkout without making an account makes them abandon their carts. One of the easiest ways to prevent this is to make account creation optional. Offer a sign up, log in, or guest checkout.
They Abandon Carts Because of Overcomplicated Checkouts
The average amount of steps for a checkout is 5 to 6. If you’re within this, but you’re still losing customers at this spot, put in a heat map. Chances are, you’re losing customers with your amount of fields to face out. When you use the heat map, you can see where exactly cart abandonment happens.
They Abandon Carts Because of Site Issues
There are many different site issues that will cause a user to abandon their cart. Slow loading times are one of the biggest offenders, as your conversion rate drops with every second that it takes for your site to load.
They Abandon Carts Because of a Lack of Trust
Customers won’t purchase from a store that they’re not able to trust. To make your website more trustworthy, make sure to use payment gateways that are familiar and popular, such as PayPal or Shop Pay, make it easy to get customer service help, and keep your site updated so users know that your site is monitored and trustworthy.
They Abandon Carts Because of Unsatisfactory Return Policies
Returns are very important to customers. That’s why carts are abandoned when customers are unsatisfied with a store’s return policies. There are two main ways to go about this. If you are willing and able, you can change your return policies to be more open. If you do not want to change your return policies, it is best to be transparent with your return policies, so potential customers know before they make a purchase what returns you accept.
A Trick to Rescue 10% of Lost Revenue
It is incredibly important to find out why users are leaving their carts and repair those issues. But this one trick can help recover up to 10% of revenue lost due to cart abandonment – winback emails.
Winback emails are exactly what they sound like, an email sent to a user who has completed an action (such as adding items to a cart, but not purchasing) to get them over the finish line and win their sale back.
There’s no one template for winback emails, but often, they offer an incentive or a reminder the customer has left their cart. This can look like a discount code, an offer for free shipping, a reminder that their items are on sale until x date, or even a suggestion of what else they might be interested in based on what is in their cart.
Email automations can be set up in most email marketing platforms. Across eCommerce merchants, we typically see Klayvio, Omnisend, MailChimp, and HubSpot. Shopify merchants have the option to use Shopify Email’s marketing automation, which has templates for customer winback automations.
