How to combat cart abandonment and increase conversions

While cart abandonment is something that every online retailer will face, increasingly so around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are a number of tactics you can use to optimise the process and re-engage with those users once they abandon their carts.

Here’s where you should start:

Simplify your navigation

Around a quarter of every user that abandons their cart does so due to an overly complex navigation. You can combat this by ensuring the number of clicks to checkout is as close to three as possible. Such as:

• Product
• Add to Cart
• Checkout

Key to this essential simplicity will be organising both your categories and products in a way that is intuitive and easy to navigate.

Allow guest purchases

By demanding that users create an account to make a purchase, you’ll likely put off a high number of potential customers as it makes the process feel much more convoluted and longer than needed.

You can also take the opportunity to gather this information at the end of the purchase process to save their information for future purchases. A simple switch in this manner will make things seem much more straightforward and helpful for the user, despite asking for the same information.

Keep your shipping costs clear and upfront

Shock at unexpected costs is one of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment. Expensive shipping costs that show up at the end of the process will be a huge turn off for your potential customers.

Keep your shipping costs transparent while a customer is browsing by using a shipping calculator or make clear upfront the discount for orders over a certain value.

A/B Test your checkout process

Optimising the checkout process is essential to reduce cart abandonment, as you’ll be continually improving the customer experience based on viable data and insights.

Consider A/B testing the following:

• Value propositions and special offers
• The number of steps in the checkout process
• Separate call to action (CTA) buttons for payment options
• Consumer confidence builders whether security labels or customer testimonials
• Cross sell and upsell options
• Retarget website users

Retargeting at a product level creates the perfect opportunity to re-engage with users that have left products abandoned in their carts.

You should be using this tactic to engage with users that viewed products and left your site, but it also works for those that abandoned their cart. Key things to consider include, the:

• Ability to show the exact product or products that were left in the cart in the ad
• Speed at which you can retarget users
• Design of your ad (it must represent your brand and products in the best possible way)
• Number of times you show the same ad to a user
• Need to change up the messaging once a retargeted user becomes a converted customer

Create cart abandonment emails

When a user has abandoned items in their cart at the final stages of the checkout process, it’s likely you have their email address, either from this checkout process or any previous purchases they may have made.

Re-engage with them through an email series notifying them that they have left items in their cart and how long you’ll hold them for. During the time period the products are held in their cart, follow up with subsequent reminders.

Key to getting this approach right is to ensure that the exact products are shown in the emails along with a relevant call to action.