What is Shopify Cart Abandonment?
Shopify cart abandonment is when a customer adds a product to their cart on your Shopify store but then leaves your website before they complete the purchase. Their cart, and the potential sale, were “abandoned”.
Cart abandonment represents a sale that you could have made. When people add an item to their cart, they generally have a very high buying intent. The customer has shown an interest in your product, but they just couldn’t commit to the sale, or find the right inspiration to get them to complete the purchase.
Luckily, an abandoned cart on your Shopify store doesn’t mean the sale is lost for good. There are plenty of ways that you can try to rope those “lost” customers back in and try to get them to make the sale.
If you want to grow your Shopify store, then one of the most important tactics to get right is reducing shopping cart abandonment. This is because it can cost five times more to acquire new customers than to sell to your existing customers. If someone has already found your products and added an item to their cart, you can practically consider this person to be a customer.
Before you start spending money on ads and trying to attract new customers, make sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize the value of everyone that is already visiting your store. Otherwise, there’s a good chance that the new customers you do acquire will also abandon their carts.
Here are some of the most important Shopify cart abandonment strategies that you can use to increase sales.
1. Reduce Friction On Your Checkout Pages
Our first Shopify cart abandonment strategy is to simplify the customer journey.
Friction refers to any extra step that could result in a customer leaving your website. This could include asking for too much information, asking for information that the customer doesn’t want to provide, making the customer navigate to different pages on your site, and more.
Quite simply, the easier you make it for your customers to check out, the more likely they will be to complete their purchase.
So, go to your checkout page and pay attention to each step the customer has to do. If there are potentially annoying steps, like asking for too many personal details or requiring a profile to complete the purchase, you might want to eliminate them.
The easier it is for your customers, the better.
2. Offer Free Shipping
One of the main reasons why shoppers abandon their carts is because of shipping costs. Offering free shipping to customers can be an absolute game-changer.
Now, we understand that shipping is a cost that you need to cover. Offering “free shipping” doesn’t mean you lose out on profit margins.
Instead, you could simply add a higher markup to your products, and remove your shipping fee. This way, you can advertise “free shipping” across your site without actually losing out.
Of course, raising prices is always a tricky business. If you are skeptical about this, consider offering a very low-cost shopping fee. Do some research into your competitors, and see what kind of fees they charge. If yours is the lowest, you can possibly steal some of their customers.
The other option is to offer free shipping on items that meet a certain threshold. This is the most popular shipping strategy, and it can help you achieve two things:
You get to advertise free shipping on your site without slimming down your margins too much
There’s a good chance you will maximize the value of your orders
Once you have figured out your shipping offer, use it as a tool for marketing campaigns. You can advertise free shipping on a banner on your site, in popups, on social media, in your marketing emails, and more.
3. Display Social Proof and Trust Badges
If you want to instill more trust into your shoppers, then it’s important to add trust indicators to your site. This is especially important for establishing trust with any new shoppers.
Trust badges could include anything that makes shoppers feel safer about using your site. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by including social proof indicators – like reviews or customer testimonials. This shows that people have trusted your site and that your products are legit.
You could also display any other trust indicators – like awards, product ratings, or anything else that proves your products are trustworthy.
People follow other people, which is why social proof and trust indicators are so incredibly valuable. If a customer feels like they are the first person to make a purchase on your site, then they will likely feel hesitant.
4. Highlight Your Value at the Checkout Page
Sometimes customers just need an extra nudge to get them to hit “buy”. Free shipping is one of these strategies, but you can add value in various other ways.
This could include highlighting your return policy, your money-back guarantee, or even a possible loyalty program that you might have – more on this later.
All of these factors help users to establish more trust in your Shopify store and feel more comfortable committing to a purchase.
Generous returns policies are especially important for eCommerce – as customers can’t see or hold the products in real life before they make a purchase. Knowing that they could return it with no risk could help to push a lot more impulse buys.
5. Send Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails
Just because someone has abandoned their shopping cart, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still interested in the product. Maybe they just need more time to think about it, or an extra push to get them to make the purchase.
One of the most effective ways to combat Shopify cart abandonment is to send out an automated cart abandonment email. You can do this if you’ve captured the shopper’s email address in a form.
45% of abandoned cart emails are opened – which is a high open rate for email marketing. This is proof that people still have the products on their minds long after they have abandoned their cart. With the right deal or nudge, abandoned cart emails can be incredibly successful.
The best part is that you don’t need to spend any time sending these. The entire process is automated, so you just set your workflow up and let your email automation tool do the work.
6. Use Abandoned Cart SMS Automation
Abandoned cart emails are a great idea, but cart abandonment SMSs can be even more effective for Shopify stores. Compared to emails, SMS marketing messages have an average 98% open rate, which is far more successful than email. They’re also opened almost instantly, which is great for pushing impulse buys after carts are abandoned.
Shopify stores can use Winback, a Shopify SMS marketing app, to easily recover abandoned carts. Winback users often recover around 34% of abandoned carts, and the app is free to start using.
Just like with abandoned cart emails, you can send special offers and discount codes in SMS campaigns. You can also set these SMS campaigns up as automated workflows so that you don’t have to spend any time sending out campaigns.
7. Set Up Exit-Intent Popups
Exit-intent popups sense when a user is about to leave your page, and so the popup triggers at just the right moment. These can be highly effective for reducing your Shopify cart abandonment rate.
A good strategy is to include a discount coupon in the popup. This could be just the push a shopper needs to go back to their cart and complete their purchase. Sure, your sale will be slightly discounted, but it’s better than losing out on the sale.
Exit intent popups could also promote any other kind of incentive – like free shipping or joining your referral campaign. You could even add extra products or bundles – something that will also help to increase the value of each cart.
The reason these popups work so well is that you simply can’t miss them. If a user decided to abandon their cart after being offered a clear discount, then they probably weren’t interested in the first place.
8. Use Live Chat On Your Checkout Pages
79% of online stores that have enabled live chat on their checkout pages report a positive impact from the live chat on their sales and customer experience.
Live chat can help guide customers through your checkout pages. It can answer any of their questions, and provide instant customer support for shoppers who aren’t quite sure about making a purchase.
You can use automated live chat to do this so that it doesn’t put any extra customer support pressure on you.
Even if customers don’t use the live chat feature, having that instant line of communication is reassuring to them, which can help to reduce your cart abandonment rate.
9. Offer Multiple Payment Options
The more payment options you provide, the greater your chances of completing a purchase.
Each customer has their own unique payment preferences. By adding as many different options as possible, you make it easier for people to pay you.
So, try to accommodate as many different payment options as you can. Luckily, this is easy with Shopify, as your Shopify payment processor should provide plenty of options.
10. Use Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are an excellent way to bring customers back to your store. These ads display the products that a user browsed, while they’re on different websites and social networks. Retargeted ads are seriously effective because the user probably already has the product on their mind. Constantly seeing this product on other sites can result in a quick purchase.
You can also use discounts, free shipping offers, and any other special promotions in your retargeting campaigns.
Just be aware of your ad spend and your retargeting ad’s click-through rate. You need to make sure that your ad spend doesn’t eat too deeply into your return on investment.
If you have a Shopify e-commerce store, or you’re planning to build one and looking for expert advice or store maintenance and management contact us! or call us. We have 10+ years of experience and We’re Shopify partners.
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