eCommerce Cart Abandonment

Abandonment happens when a website visitor leaves before their order is completed. There is a difference between checkout abandonment and cart abandonment and as an e-commerce merchant, it is important to understand the difference.

Cart abandonment occurs when a customer has added products to their shopping cart, but doesn’t get to the point where they can submit payment information. Checkout abandonment is when users add items to their cart, starts entering payment information, and then abandons the process.

Cart abandonment is pretty common - people simply want to look around in the online store and do a bit of window shopping and possibly compare pricing, but that’s not the case all the time. It’s important for merchants to look at where and why users are leaving their site. You want to understand what’s going on with your e-commerce website (cart abandonment vs. checkout abandonment) if you want to correct the problem.

With cart abandonment, the use of incentives and/or discounts are a proven way to encourage users to actually complete the checkout process. Merchants can use remarketing/retargeting software to bring back those visitors that never arrived to the checkout page. With checkout abandonment, the merchant needs to figure out what went wrong. Perhaps the shipping costs were too high, the registration was too lengthy, or the coupon they had already expired. As a merchant, what can you do with this information? Perhaps shipping costs could be shared earlier instead of the last process of checkout, registration forms can be shortened or break up payment forms into more manageable parts.

Our Live Imagination software includes several tools for tracking cart adandonment. When a customers starts the checkout process, the customers contact information is collected including their email address. From there their order is saved into a pre-sale module which allows you as the merchant to see their full order in their cart, what products they looked at on the website, and how far they made it in the checkout process. As an added feature, you can also configure your shopping cart to email the customer a follow up promo code after a set amount of hours if they don't complete checkout.

The problem of abandonment is significant, but there are steps for merchants to take to ensure that users stay engaged and moving through the whole process from selection to checkout to payment. It pays to be proactive and engage with your users to see what you could possibly be doing differently to ensure to you receive their business.