Hola! Those damn abandoned shopping carts. What’s a retailer to do? Well, in a couple previous posts we put up some ideas on how to get ‘em to come back and buy after they left: sending an abandoned cart email campaign and using ad remarketing to convince them to pull out that wallet and lay down some cold hard cash.

Well, let’s get proactive today and talk about ways to stop people from fleeing your cart in the first place, and how to reduce shopping cart abandonment right off the bat, shall we?

Here’s a great study from Statista outlining the main reasons shoppers do not complete a purchase:

Work your way through this list!

So let’s drill in to how you can reduce shopping cart abandonment! We have personally experienced gains from the following:

1) State your shipping costs upfront! Ask for the zip code in the cart pre-check out and serve up your shipping options (i.e. slow boat, 3-4 day, overnight) with associated costs. It’s amazing how many sites still don’t offer this. That said, not to overcomplicate things, but consider an upgrade to free shipping in the cart if they reach a certain cart value.

2) Use the Express Lane mentality! We are inpatient breed, aren’t we? Too many steps, too many clicks and you are dead. Well, not you, but your sales numbers. And your bonus. And your dreams of that big promotion next quarter. If you do choose a multi-step checkout, make the steps and progress clear. wine.com does a nice job of executing on a multi-step cart:

The clear progress steps help reduce cart abandonment

3) MBG - The trusty ‘ol Money Back Guarantee, or even better Low Price Guarantee. Look up (at the chart), 36% of folks didn’t complete their purchase because they found a better deal somewhere else. So match it, at least for certain products. And show them how easy - and free! - it is to return their product and get a refund.

Now first and foremost, always test then measure (after all we ARE a business dashboards company.) Do not do a radical change without testing. Promise us that, OK? What works for some retailers and sites may not work for others!

Hello. This is our second in a series of 4 or 5 posts about reducing and rescuing shopping cart abandonment. In our previous post on the subject, we provided some background on the issue, and led with our #1 post-abandonment recommendation: send them an email asking them to complete their order! Now, we’re taking it one step further. And please don’t think of this as stalking. If done correctly it’s not. There’s plenty you can do to reduce abandoned before your eager shoppers flee, but as mentioned we’ll tackle that in some upcoming posts.

We’re gonna focus on the #2 key action to take after you lost them.

AD REMARKETING
According to AdRoll, a self-service advertising remarketing platform, “2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. Remarketing brings back the other 98%. Remarketing works by keeping track of people who visit your site (via cookies) and displaying your remarketing ads to them as they visit other sites online.”

So let’s say a person comes to your website and leaves without purchasing. Maybe they placed an item right in your scart. You can then use a service like Google Adwords, AdRoll, or Retargeter to display the ads you choose to that shopper as they visit other sites online. Here’s a B2B example:

Here’s some serious Ad Remarketing in action!

We’ve visited both Optimizely (we actually use it under a different account) and the very cool Insightly (gonna sign up soon!), but did not take action. Did we actually place these ‘services’ in a cart? Not really, but we got to the pricing pages and ‘create an account’ then left. So basically an equivalent action. And bingo! Here’s some relevant ads as I’m browsing around other sites. We’ve seen ad remarketing increase conversion rates and help rescue shopping cart abandonment by huge rates. Once again the costs for this type of marketing is low, and the returns are high, so give it a go!

Drag ‘em over the finish line, that’s what! Collectively, we’ve done a boat load of online retail: wine, software, food, apparel, you name it. Almost started a monthly dog treat club , but Bark Box came along! Anyhoo, our nemesis is always that damn abandoned shopping cart!

So this is #1 of maybe 4 or 5 posts about this tragedy! It’ll go something like - 1) post-abandon ideas 2) more of those 3) pre-abandon fixes 4) more of those. Looks to be honing in on 4.

OK, conservative estimates show that approximately 1 out of 3 online orders are abandoned during the checkout process. Others, like a study from Baymard Institute state that an average of 22 different studies show a 68% cart abandon rate! Whoa, that’s a big sieve, and it’s pouring $$$ out of it.

Take a quick example. You’re currently making $30,000/mo in online revenue. Your abandoned cart rate is 50%. That’s $15,000 in lost revenue. If you could convince 1/4 of those folks just to hit that ‘check out’ button, that’s an additional $45 grand a year. So let’s talk about how to plug it. And it’s really not that difficult.

There’s plenty you can do to reduce abandoned shopping carts before your eager shoppers flee, but as mentioned we’ll tackle that in some upcoming posts. We’re gonna focus on the #1 key action to take after you lost them. Drum roll…

SEND THEM AN EMAIL!

Hey, maybe their lunch arrived just before they hit ‘check out’. Or maybe your site was slow that day. Or a shiny object distracted them. Whatever the reason, there’s no shame in Asking For The Order. So do it! Key elements include:

• Pictures of the item they selected
• Reviews or testimonials from other shoppers
• Guarantee and refund policy information
• A strong call-to-action to get them back to your site

Here’s an abandoned shopping cart recovery email I received from Gilt after approximately 24 hours of placing this sharp pair of linen trousers in my cart:

Abandoned cart email from Gilt

Hey it coulda been even better if it included the elements we just mentioned. But y’know what? It worked. Team Dasheroo will be sporting Sand Linen Trousers to the next happy hour!

Next, think hard about the number of and timing of these abandoned shopping cart emails. We’ve tested immediate, say within 2 hours, to 12-24 hours then a couple reminders. Here’s an outline:

• 1st email – should go out within 24 hrs
• 2nd email – send within 2 days
• 3rd email – send within 1 week

Make sure to watch your unsubs and any negative feedback, as if you get too aggressive you can annoy some folks. And, test your timing and frequency.

Oh, here’s a few tools that specialize in hooking up with your shopping cart to automate the process of sending abandoned shopping cart emails:

• Rejoiner
• CartRescuer
• AbandonAid

So go get those lost sales, they’re just sitting there waiting for you to boost your ROI!

There is a TON of stuff you need to track for your ecommerce business but we’re just focusing on a few things that can really move your needle. If you sell products from your site, for sure you have an ecommerce dashboard. So let’s dig in.

1. The day of the week that sales rock! If you know what day of the week your sales are killing it you need to start marketing your stuff around that day. Set up your social media and email marketing campaigns for it to maximize the amount of sales you can have.

2. Shopping cart funnel - You need to look at where people are falling out of the cart in order to maximize your sales. If you’ve got 3 pages between the cart and the purchase and you see in your dashboard that on page 2 people bail, you need to combine page 1 and 2 asap. You might even want to offer live chat on your checkout page in the event your would-be customer has a question.

3. Track how people get to your site to buy - With Google Analytics > Aquisition > All Traffic, you can track if your buyers came from email, PPC, organic or social. So if Social is driving the most traffic and the best buyers, you need to do more with your social marketing.

In this example of a Shopify dashboard you can tell shopping cart abandonment and best sales days!

Happy selling!