What is an abandoned cart?
An abandoned cart is an online shopping cart that had items added by the shopper, but the purchase wasn’t completed before the shopper exited the site. Any time a shopper adds items to their cart on your ecommerce store, but fails to complete the transaction, you can consider that an abandoned cart. Tracking customer behavior, particularly cart abandonment rate, can help ecommerce retailers make critical changes to their site’s user experience. You can calculate your cart abandonment rate by simply dividing your store’s total number of transactions completed by the total number of carts created.
Why do online shoppers abandon their carts?
There are numerous reasons why online shoppers may abandon their carts on your ecommerce site. Intangible and unavoidable explanations aside (like “just comparing prices” and “research”), abandon cart data can be helpful for you to improve your customer experience, conversion rate, and customer retention. One of the most common issues online shoppers experience in the checkout process has to do with shipping. The most commonly cited shipping issues are the lack of express shipping options and unexpected shipping costs. Those are easy fixes to consider for your own store. Other common causes of abandoned carts include: lengthy and confusing checkout, concerns regarding payment security, and being forced to create a customer account. Understanding the points of friction in your store’s checkout process can help you make adjustments to improve your cart abandonment rate.