Imagine this: A customer is browsing through your online store, adds some products to the cart, clicks to check out… and..
Silence.
You wait, but the customer disappears. No confirmation. No sales. Just silence.
You feel your cart being abandoned with no clear reason. Welcome to this term, which all businesses are now aware of, where a customer actually ghosts you. While it may sound like just a normal user behaviour on the platform, the truth may be much more grave. This simple practice silently drains away revenue, disrupts forecasting, and chips away at customer trust for e-commerce businesses. According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is estimated at around 70%, making numerous sales potential slip through the cracks.
What exactly causes shoppers to walk away after they have actually expressed themselves as intent buyers? And how bad could that damage a business? Read through this blog and let’s decode it all.
What is Cart Abandonment Really?
A cart abandonment is a situation where an online buyer begins a transaction journey by selecting a product/service and adding it to their cart. However, instead of proceeding further to complete their transaction, leave it in the card and leave the app or website. The cart abandonment rate significantly ranges higher across all industries. It is estimated that for every 10 customers who show interest, 7 of them leave without buying.
Why Do Customers Abandon Carts?
Cart abandonment can happen for multiple reasons, and for the business wanting to improve this, it needs to understand its underlying reasons. Here’s why:
Unexpected Cost at Checkout:
Most of the time, business adds surprise costs and fees that are visible during checkout. Shipping charges, taxes, and platform fees do not appear in the original product. So yes, customers hate surprises, especially the expensive ones, leading them to take a U-turn.
Forced Account Creation:
Some platforms take a customer through a tiresome process of a long and mandatory sign-up, which can be a real deal-breaker. Sometimes, all the customer wants is to view the price and make an instant purchase through a guest checkout option. Signing up will make them leave the app or website midway.
Payment Issues:
Making payment is the critical part of the purchase where the buyer actually pauses their continuous clicks and scrolls to make careful moves. If the platform has limited payment options, slow process time, or fails to complete attempts, it will turn away the customers just before the conversion.
How Does Cart Abandonment Affect the E-Commerce Business
While every cart abandonment may seem like a minor missed opportunity, the collected impact may be massive. Here is how it can hurt your e-commerce business:
1. Lost Revenue:
It goes without saying that the first thing that a business loses is its sales and, ultimately, the revenue. Every cart that’s been abandoned represents potential profit that vanishes at a crucial point of purchase. At the bottom line, it hinders business growth, acting as a prominent leak in your sales pipeline.
2. Wasted Marketing Funds:
Every business pours a high amount of funds into marketing to attract potential customers to their website. They meticulously craft every campaign, build engagement on social media, invest in blog content, and do targeted email marketing. All these efforts and money put into achieving that led to a total failure with customer cart abandonment, at a time when they were just about to fulfil the main business goal. You pay to attract them to your virtual storefront, only to watch them leave.
3. Customer Frustration Damages Branding:
If a customer abandons a cart out of frustration, it will leave a negative impression on them about your brand. They may never come back or spread the same frustration to their peers. This can lead to tarnishing a brand’s image and degrading customer trust. Chucky forms, surprising shipping costs, or confusing payment gateways will truly annoy them, acting as a friction point to make them abandon the cart at the time of a promising purchase.
4. Missed Opportunity for Upselling:
There are a number of times when a customer adds multiple items to the cart to purchase them all at once. It brings the business a golden opportunity for both upselling and cross-selling. For example, they have chosen a camera and receiving a well-timed suggestion for adding a camera bag as well can significantly increase the business’s order value. However, with cart abandonment, it can all go down in vain, leaving potential revenue right on the table. It ultimately hinders the ability to increase sales and drive profitability.
Wrapping Up
Cart abandonment is not just a tech issue. A UX won’t solve it, but a human-centric approach might. Shoppers leave the cart when something feels off be it pricing, speed, trust, or transparency. And that’s the pain point you need to solve. In the competitive market of e-commerce, winners are not just the ones who attract more traffic, but the ones who actually close the deal. When shopping comes online, ‘almost’ bought still means ‘not bought’.
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