It’s not uncommon for ecommerce shoppers to abandon carts. You may not know it, but your store might also be suffering from carts being abandoned. This problem can be addressed however. To start, you must determine why your customers abandon their carts.

Why online shoppers abandon carts and what you can do about it?

There are various reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts. We lay out the most common ones and what you can do to address them.

Checkout is Too Complicated

Your customers will nitpick and that is to be expected. When you make your customers jump hoops during checkout, you’re not doing them a favor. Your checkout should be quick and straightforward. If you must add some other stuff that will complicate checkout, consider if you can add it on the thank you page instead. The thank you page is the page where the customer is redirected to after making a successful purchase. If you need help tweaking your thank you page, the Wooassist team can help.

Users Need to Create an Account to Check Out

Internet users are already burned out having to create an account for each internet service that they use. Don’t add to that burden. Don’t force your customers to create an account if it’s not necessary. To enable guest checkouts on WooCommerce, go to your WordPress Dashboard, click on WooCommerce > Settings. Under the Account and Privacy tab, enable “Allow customers to place orders without an account”. You can tweak other account related settings here to your liking.

Too Many Checkout Form Fields

The default WooCommerce checkout page is good enough as it is. There is no need to add more fields unless necessary. If you’ve edited your checkout page before to add some unnecessary fields, look into it and consider removing it.

Unexpected Charges

Customers will abandon your checkout when they see the shipping fee. No one will force you to offer free shipping if it will make your business unsustainable. There are however some things that you can do to reduce abandoned carts as a result of shipping and other fees. People now are more accepting of shipping fees. For other fees, be transparent from the get-go. If you charge taxes, handling fees, and other fees, make it clear starting from the product page that you charge these fees. If they are suddenly greeted by these fees on checkout, it will look like unscrupulous practice.

Too Many Clicks to Checkout

Reducing cart abandonment is all about simplifying your product purchase process. Ideally, it should not take more than three clicks for a customer to check out. If it takes four clicks to check out, that is one click too many. Get rid of unnecessary barriers to completing checkout.

Don’t Make it Hard to Contact You

Some of your prospective customers will look for your contact details before they make a purchase. If they added a product to their cart but could not find your contact information or even a contact us page, there is a high likelihood that that user will abandon that cart. To prevent this from happening, make sure you have a contact us page. Even better, if you can add your email or phone number on your WooCommerce store’s header.

Payment Issues

Another common reason for abandoning shopping carts is payment issue. When the customer tries to pay for his/her order and it fails, you can bet that cart will be abandoned. The solution here is simple. Offer more than one mode of payment. Some common payment channels you can use are Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Square.

Other Things You Can Do to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Show Security Certificates

To be able to sell your products or services online, you’ll need to be able to establish that you are trustworthy. You can show security certificates and security seals on your checkout page to improve your trust rating. Some security seals that you can add to your site as Norton, McAfee and TRUSTe.

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping can significantly reduce your cart abandonment rates. However, not every business can make a profit when offering free shipping. As an alternative, you can offer free shipping when your customers meets a required minimum order value or quantity. This strategy can also help improve your average order value.

Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

Most consumer laws dictate that you should have a return policy anyway. So there’s no reason not to do it. Making your money-back guarantee known shows your prospective customers that you have faith in the quality of your product or service. Don’t worry about the people that might abuse your money-back guarantee. It hardly ever happens. And if it happens a lot, the problem might be your product.

Improve Your Page Load Speeds

If your site is slow, some of your prospective customers might get frustrated and abandon their carts. Make sure your site is fast.

How to Recover Abandoned Carts

There are many ways to recover abandoned carts. Some of the more common methods are remarketing and abandoned cart emails.

Using Remarketing to Recover Abandoned Carts

There are many platforms that you can use for remarketing. Essentially, remarketing works by saving a cookie on the user’s browser so you can show them your tailored ads. Neil Patel details how you can use remarking on Adwords to recover abandoned carts. Facebook is another platform that you can use for remarketing. SproutSocial details how to use remarketing on Facebook.

Using Abandoned Cart Emails to Recover Abandoned Carts

Abandoned cart emails send your customers a reminder email if they did not complete their purchase. For guest checkouts, this requires that the user must at least have entered his/her email address. This won’t be an issue if you require your customers to register before making a purchase. Do note however that requiring customers to create an account may hurt your conversion rates. There are a lot of abandoned cart email plugins that work for WooCommerce, you just have to find the plugin that works for your needs.

Recover abandoned carts and improve your sales by implementing these strategies. If you have any questions, you can post a comment below. If you need help setting up abandoned cart emails or anything else, you can send us email.