Recent research has revealed that shopping carts are abandoned by about 65 per cent of all online customers and for various reasons. It means that all that hard work and planning that has gone into optimizing landing pages and creating attractive pricing strategies can come to a naught in about seven out of 10 potential customers visiting your website. That’s definitely a depressing scenario for any ecommerce enterprise. The estimated revenue loss due to shopping cart abandonment will reach around 30 billion dollars soon.
Shopping Cart Abandonment – The Prime Reasons
It is important to know why cart abandonment happens and how to recover them. It is commonly believed that customers abandon shopping carts because they change their mind at the last minute. But dig a bit deeper and you’ll know that it’s not that simple. Some of the key reasons for abandonment of shopping carts at the very last minute include:
Unexpected costs that did not reflect during the shopping process are the main reason for abandonment of carts. Imagine spending your valuable picking up items that you need for an upcoming party, carefully picking and choosing stuff so that your limited budget does not go haywire, only to discover at the checkout that there is packaging fee or a card processing fee that adds substantially to the final figure. You are bound to feel cheated as your budget goes for a toss.
Will you continue your purchase or try another store where the whole buying process is more transparent? In online shopping, most unexpected inflation in bills comes in the form of shipping and packaging costs. Consumers shopping online show a wide preference for free shipping ecommerce sites because they can help them save substantially, especially when they shop regularly. Most retailers offer free shipping with a minimum order. Others offer free shipping on select items while merchandize that are deemed bulky or fragile may attract an extra handling and shipping charge, which is a fair trade practice.
Why You Must Deal with the Problem Quickly
Many retailers believe that shop abandonment is part of the buying cycle. It’s tough to understand the consumer’s motivation for buying. It’s hard to find out whether consumers who abandon carts are there on your website with the intention to buy or want to simply waste the time of merchants. Some surveys identify that nearly 75 per cent of visitors come to a website with the intent to buy, maybe not immediately but sometime in the future. That’s why it’s imperative to get your email and text remarketing triggered immediately after the shopping cart has been abandoned.
Assuming a good number of visitors abandon carts because they have not come across the kind of deals and shipping they are looking for, it is all the more important to remain visible to customers when they resume their search.
Abandonment of shopping cart can also happen because they found a website that compare prices and found a merchant that sells the same brand cheaper. This problem can be addressed by keeping prices as competitive as possible or introducing attractive offers at fairly frequent intervals.
