Shopping Cart Abandonment is Killing Your Sales

If you have an online store, do you know what your “abandonment rate” is?

Note: An abandoned shopping cart is where a visitor adds one or more items to their “cart”, but doesn’t complete the sale.

In my main store I had figured there was a percentage doing that, and didn’t worry about it.

But then I started looking at my traffic and thinking the conversions were lower than they should be.

Then I saw that there was a relatively new feature built into the eCommerce software I use, that shows abandoned carts … showing the actual carts and items that were added but not purchased!

Over the prior four weeks I had 3 abandoned carts for every completed one. Ouch

Some of them I could disregard. I could tell it was someone who added an item and then later bought it, the same day or the next day. It was just a different session.

But excluding those, it was still way too many.

Unless you’re capturing the emails of those people, you can’t follow up with them. And if you do try to capture emails, when someone is first visiting your site, you risk repelling them … and they don’t go to the cart at all.

Not really an easy solution.

One thing you can do: try Free Shipping

Though I did some research on this topic. One site did some extensive surveying of their shoppers, and the abandoned carts.

Found that the number 1 reason for abandoned carts (for those really shopping, not just curiosity seekers) was because of shipping charges.

They ended up implementing free shipping, with a minimum purchase amount ($75 in their case). And that decreased the abandonments, increased their sales and increased their profits.

So that inspired me to do the same on our site. I had tried it before, with no minimum purchase amount, and that didn’t work (too many small sales, where shipping killed the profit).

So I did free shipping, and made it with a minimum purchase ($150) that ensured we weren’t giving too much up profit-wise.

Right after that we had a sale for $170!  That was a sign that it was the right move.

Though I just did this change. We’ll see how it does over time. So far it’s looking good.

I’d really like to convert more of those carts to sales!