Posted by Daniel Jauk, 26 Mar, 2015 | 2 Comments »
Shopping cart abandonment is a huge pain for businesses trying to make ends meet. A report by Business Insider released early last year estimated that US$4 trillion of sales would be lost by December because of shopping cart abandonment, but they also suggested that these sales can be recovered. So what are the reasons for shopping cart abandonment in WordPress and how can we overcome these abandoned shopping carts? Read on below…
This 2012 stat by Statista gives you the big reasons for shopping cart abandonment: expensive products, unexpected costs, long processes, and customers just browsing.
A heavy cost is probably one of the most obvious reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Your customer adds a bunch of items to their cart, but when it comes time to pay they realise the total tally gives them a nasty surprise (it’s like buyers remorse, but before they actually buy). You can try to combat this by providing incentives. Consider offering a coupon if the customer ‘shares’ or ‘likes’ the item on social media (check out social coupons for WordPress), or provide reduced prices if customers join your mailing list.
Some websites are unclear about their shipping and handling costs in totalling the price of their products, which is another one of the reasons for shopping cart abandonment. You can overcome this by stating the shipping and handling cost in plain English at the start of the process or on one of your main WordPress webpages (even if you have a large shipping cost, it’s better to be transparent than to lose a sale from customers suddenly being aware of the cost towards the end of the checkout process). Another way to overcome big shipping and handling costs is to occasionally offer free shipping. If you want to learn more about this, there’s a really cool article on Web Marketing Today showing how this is possible.
The more time it takes to checkout, the more likely it is that your customer changes his mind and abandons the cart. Make your checkout simple, straight forward and fast! Don’t force your customers to jump through loops and double back to previous steps in order to complete their checkout process. This can make customers concerned because they might think they have done something wrong or that there’s an error with the website. Try to simplify your process as much as possible so that customers will always be moving from one stop to the next. Sometimes customers might find it difficult just even finding the shopping cart. You can overcome this by installing plugins that will display a shopping cart in all pages of your website, like WooCommerce Menu Cart, which displays your shopping cart in the navigation bar.
Sometimes customers just want to browse your products and use your shopping cart as a wish list. You can overcome these reasons for shopping cart abandonment by installing a WordPress wish list plugin, like YITH WooCommerce Wishlist.
Sometimes it’s not worth worrying too much about the reasons for shopping cart abandonment, because your customer might plan on returning later; other times, however, your customer may have actually forgotten about the products in their shopping cart. In either case, a way of increasing your sale would be to send out emails reminding your customers to recover their abandoned shopping carts with coupons included as part of the email. If you’re interested in this option, check out the Woocommerce Abandoned Cart Lite WordPress plugin.
There are quite a few reasons for shopping cart abandonment, but, as you can see, there are a bunch of easy solutions, such as some readily available (free) WordPress plugins, which should help you overcome them. If you have any questions, make sure you search through the support forums at wordpress.org, and, as always, feel free to leave a comment below.
My biggest reason is when I have to go through the registration process just to find out the shipping costs. In other words, I’m just browsing but I’m only abandoning the process as I’m forced to go through the process to find out the cost.
Great idea for a blog article, Daniel. I haven’t seen this issue addressed so succinctly before.
I agree with Pete about having to register in order to learn shipping costs of for a particular purchase. Surely there are ways around this which gather useful data for the business whilst offering the visitor a sweetener of some kind. This might be in the form of a chance to win a $5 voucher against an eventual purchase, for instance. Just a thought.