Abandoning the shopping cart is no longer a specific problem that only a few e-commerce store owners grapple with. Instead, it has become a general issue faced by the largest stores at high rates every day. According to a recent statistic, the cart abandonment rate reaches about 77.24%. This means that out of every ten people who enter the store, seven of them leave the shopping cart without completing the payment process.  

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This is a very high percentage that inflicts heavy losses on many stores, especially those that do not take quick measures to reduce these rates. For this reason, e-commerce store owners need to arm themselves with strategies and solutions to address this problem, the neglect of which causes massive losses to your store.  

Therefore, in this article, we will present you with 10 strategies that have effective and proven results by many major stores to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates and increase sales. But before we start, let us first define what is meant by abandoning the cart:

What is Cart Abandonment?

The term "abandoned carts" is one of the most prominent terms and challenges associated with e-commerce, which causes great concern to store owners. 

Shopping cart abandonment refers to a customer who enters the online store, puts many products into the shopping cart, but leaves the cart before completing the purchase process. There may be many types of cart abandonment, but the electronic checkout stage is the stage at which the cart is most commonly abandoned. 

Abandoning the shopping cart means more missed sales opportunities and many lost customers. Therefore, we cannot neglect searching for the main reason why customers leave carts on your online store, so you can address the problem and turn it into an opportunity to gain more sales and retain customers as long as possible.

How to activate the abandoned cart reminders feature on Salla 

The Salla platform is keen to help its clients retain customers who have abandoned their shopping carts. For this reason, we have added the abandoned cart reminders feature to Salla stores, which you can activate on your online store in simple steps:

1. Go to your store account on the Salla platform

2. From the side control panel, choose the Abandoned Carts icon logo

   3.  Choose Create New Reminder

 4- With the reminder feature, you can send discounts on abandoned carts to your customers automatically and without any effort on your part.

5- Simply, you can set the reminder conditions as you want.

10 Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate and Increase Sales

Every problem has a solution, even shopping cart abandonment. Although you cannot lower abandonment rates to 0%, you can significantly reduce them by identifying and fixing the areas of deficiency in your store. Now, before we see how you can do that, let us classify the reasons for leaving the shopping cart so that we can put things in their proper place.

The reasons for abandoning the shopping cart can be classified mainly into the following areas:

• Trust issues.

• Payment methods and options issues.

• Issues related to using the website.

• Shipping-related issues.

If we can address these problems in a systematic and organized manner, we will be able to significantly reduce the cart abandonment rate. Also, the correct product shopping methods play a major role in retaining customers.

1- Use email 

The losses of online store owners resulting from cart abandonment are estimated at $4 trillion annually. However, smart store owners can recover 63% of abandoned cart profits through email campaigns. Abandoned cart emails are considered one of the most prominent successful strategies because they are the direct way to communicate with the customer after leaving the cart, and they are also an excellent way to provide a positive experience for them as part of their recovery process to the site. There are many automation tools that can do this task for you. 

Sending customized messages to customers who have abandoned their cart, and persuading them to complete the order, has proven to significantly reduce the abandonment rate. However, there are some practices you can do to ensure a successful email campaign, which are: 

1- An email with an attractive subject line

Tell me, how many times have you opened an email because its subject line was appealing to you? Many times indeed. 

Writing a subject line that grabs buyers' attention can sometimes seem like a difficult task, and it can be easy when you remember that you need to appeal to buyers' emotions.

I will give you some examples that make buyers pause for a moment to read your message:

• Don't miss this offer.

• It seems you forgot something important.

• Products waiting for you to acquire them.

• There is a surprise for you here, open it now.

Here are examples of attractive and somewhat playful titles, like the one in the picture.

Did you know that this might be the right time to respond to buyers' objections regarding your product? How?

Drafting an email campaign with an attractive subject line that talks about the product's features and why it is the right product for them. This can be a successful way to win back customers and urge them to fill the shopping cart with your product. Learn about the most famous search engines.

2- Remind buyers of abandoned items

Reminder emails are helpful and influence purchasing decisions. It is possible that the buyer left the cart due to something sudden or urgent (and it actually happened to me, while browsing the products of a famous online store, the power went out for seconds). Therefore, it is nice to remind them of these items. 

If they left it voluntarily for some reason, one way to urge these shoppers to buy is by including images of the items they left in their carts. 

Send these reminders at successive intervals as follows:

• The first reminder 24 hours after leaving the cart.

• The second reminder 48 hours after leaving the cart.

• The third reminder 72 hours after leaving the cart.

Do not worry about sending many messages; there are some stores that organize an email campaign consisting of seven reminder messages to recover customers who abandoned their cart.

Note: Monitor the rate of change in buyers to know which part of the campaigns is achieving effective results, and what is the suitable duration to continue sending messages. The important thing is to always test many practices to determine the best among them. Here are also strategies for targeting new customers.

3- Use an incentive to encourage buyers to purchase 

Buyers are easily attracted to incentives that enable them to get the products they love. These incentives may be represented in a discount, free shipping and delivery, or a gift. Therefore, experts advise you to use this strategy. If you send reminder messages and do not receive any response, you will find satisfying results. You can learn about brand building strategies.

Warning: Use discounts wisely and do not overdo them, as they may reduce the value of your brand and decrease your profits in the long run. 

2- Provide different payment options 

18% of users leave the shopping cart due to financial security reasons and the inability to share their financial data with stores that provide only one payment method. This is a sufficient reason to push e-commerce stores, especially small ones, to provide secure payment choices for buyers. Learn about the best payment gateways.

Linking the name of a large online store with the name of a famous payment method serves as reassurance to buyers that their financial information will be safe from hackers.

You must also keep in mind that not all buyers have the same payment methods; indeed, in some countries, certain payment methods are blocked. Therefore, the user may leave the cart although the products met their satisfaction, because the payment options are not suitable for them. You can add many financial options such as credit cards - Visa - MasterCard - PayPal... and others.

The following image from IKEA shows how they use multiple payment options to ensure a convenient user experience.

The different payment options you offer must be secure and reliable to create a state of transparency and trust between you and the buyer.

Extra tip: Since we have touched upon the financial part, I would like to give you this advice, which is to be honest with the customer regarding anything related to the financial part and costs. They should not be surprised by additional costs upon delivery. They must be aware of all details before the payment process.

If you add extra costs that you did not tell the customer about, this could be a heavy blow to the trust between you, especially if the customer is dealing with you for the first time. This action will make them hesitant before buying from you again, and they might decide not to enter your store ever again. 

3- Optimize the shopping cart 

You might feel at first glance that this strategy is unrelated to the core of the subject, but in fact, optimizing the shopping cart to provide many options for the buyer is an important factor in reducing the cart abandonment rate. You can optimize the cart as follows:

• Make it capable of saving the items chosen by customers; a customer might leave the shopping cart due to a malfunction or an emergency, or to browse another site to compare prices and shipping and delivery costs. Upon returning to your site, they might be too lazy to put the items in the cart again and close the site... This means you have lost a potential customer, but with an option like this, you will work on retaining them.

• Make the cart icon visible on all pages of the store. It might seem like a small detail, but it is useful in the long run.

• Make the number of selected items visible on the cart icon.

• Make it easily editable. Remember that the customer, after finishing the purchase process, might back out of buying a certain item; they should be able to do so smoothly without hassle. 

In the following image from BestSelf store, look where the arrow points; you will find that the cart icon is visible on all pages of the store in the same format, showing the number of items that have been added. 

4- Invest in making your site mobile-friendly

Did you know that 90% of internet browsing operations are done through smartphones, and that more than 90% of shopping transactions are also done through smartphones? Therefore, any site whose design is not suitable for smartphones and is not easy to use will be out of the competition in e-commerce.

The thing that will encourage you most to pay attention to this step is knowing that 25% of shoppers left the shopping cart due to the difficulty of browsing the store.

Extra tip: Also invest in improving Usability and User Experience (UX). These two factors play a major role in determining how long a user will stay on the site or app.

You need to test your site, especially checkout pages, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and payment pages on both the smartphone screen version and the desktop version to ensure your site works efficiently.

Practical step: You can easily conduct these tests using sites like ready.mobi and mobiletest.me.

This test will reveal if there are any difficulties users might face while using your site.

For example: the test will show you if buttons or links are too close, to the point that the user might click on the wrong links. Take into consideration that great features like pop-ups that look excellent on the desktop version can cause scrolling issues on the mobile screen version.

After discovering the shortcomings we gave examples of, you must enlist the help of an expert to guide you to the best practices that eliminate these problems; you should not rely only on the tests of these sites. E-commerce platform

5- Utilize exit-intent pop-ups (Exit Pop-up)

There is another easy way to reach customers at the last moment before the shopping cart is abandoned, which is using pop-ups. Often, customers decide they want to do more research before making a purchase.

You can use pop-ups with the purpose of including exit messages from your store's pages. These messages reduce cart abandonment and increase your sales. This strategy is carried out by the LC Waikiki store as shown in the picture.

The exit messages strategy must include something of value to offer to customers if they decide to leave your site. These messages could include the following:

• Discounts.

• Free shipping and delivery offers.

• Contests.

• Discounts on additional items.

You do not need a pop-up with exit messages on every page of your site, but you must definitely include them on product pages and checkout pages. Make sure they are eye-catching and the offer is attractive enough to entice your customers to complete their transactions.

6- Create a sense of urgency to purchase

One of the tried and trusted ways marketers use to encourage customers to complete the purchasing process is creating a sense of urgency.

This strategy is based on the FOMO principle, which stands for Fear Of Missing Out. 

This can be done through the following:

•  Adding a countdown timer for the product: AMAZON implements this strategy. If a customer wants a certain product by a specific date, they must order it within, say, 10 hours and 18 minutes.

• There is another way to let your customers know when a product is running out of stock. If it shows that only one item is left in stock, you are creating a sense of scarcity that forces people to act accordingly. Consequently, they make the decision to buy because they do not want to miss out on anything.

• Using phrases that indicate this, such as: limited-time discounts, hurry up to catch the offers, ends tomorrow. 

The following example shows how the ban.do store uses the FOMO principle: 

7- Offer a money-back guarantee feature 

Although e-commerce is growing and flourishing dramatically, a large category of people has not completely adapted to it; this makes one of the reasons people back out of the purchase decision at the last moment the fear of wasting money. Many questions urge people, such as: What if the product is not of the quality I expect? What if the size is not suitable? What if I change my mind after inspecting the product in reality?

To put doubts to rest and reassure people, you can offer a feature for customers to get their money back within a specified period if they do not like the product, such as 90 days from the date of receiving the product. This strategy suggests to the customer that you are giving them greater value, and aiming to win their satisfaction in the first place. 

Note: Some stores provide a lifetime warranty feature for the product. This is considered a gesture of trust and integrity that makes the customer buy without any fear or anxiety. 

8- Provide the guest checkout feature (Allow Guest Checkout)

The most boring part of buying online is filling out the payment form fields, and this matter can become even more boring when the payment form is too long or asks for unnecessary information.

People want an easy and fast purchasing experience. What benefit is there if there is a series of exhausting steps for buyers? Imagine that 31% of buyers tend to leave the shopping cart when they find they need to complete a long series of account registration steps before buying the product. To eliminate the problem of abandoning the shopping cart, offer the option to view the product and pay for it as a guest, i.e., without registering an account. Offer the option to view the product and pay for it as a guest, i.e., without registering an account.

If you want customers to register an account on the site, you must first give them the opportunity to buy the product and then ask them to create an account, or you can include the login process in the purchasing process without complications or exhausting steps, as a large group of stores does.

You can hire an expert to help you set only the checkout fields you need to avoid any details the user might get bored of, and you can try for yourself how the fields look, and whether they are essential or can be disposed of. 

Some points that must be available on the custom checkout page:

1- The design of the checkout page must match the look and feel of your site in terms of design style and colors. Likewise, it must be professionally designed with the user in mind. The form should be short and easy to fill, and contain an input validation feature to easily catch any error for the customer to fix.

2- There must be clear and prominent call-to-action buttons, so it is better to distinguish the purchase buttons from the rest of the buttons for the customer to see easily.

3- The checkout page must also contain a prominent image of the product, as well as information about the product cost, shipping costs, and taxes (all financial costs) as previously mentioned, and the delivery date.

4- The shopping cart must be easy to edit, so that the customer is able to remove products from the cart, change quantities, or change other variables such as color, size, etc. (when needed).

5- The checkout page must also contain signals that reassure the customer along the way, such as security information, because what worries customers most is insecure transactions.

6- Place a progress indicator for the customer, which showing the components of completing the checkout process, such as personal data, payment method... order review to ensure their information is correct. Here is an example to make the idea clear in the image.

A tip for excellence: If you want your store to stand out with a unique feature, you can provide a product tracking feature so that the customer is kept informed of the stage the product has reached; since many customers are in a state of anxiety and anticipation for the delivery time. Provide them with this feature and your store will be at the top and the shopping cart will not be abandoned.

9- Take advantage of retargeting 

I mentioned to you a short while ago that 63% of smart store owners recover customers. By using retargeting, you bring qualified potential customers back to your store, and this can have an even bigger impact when you make retargeting ads personalized for a segment of customers, thereby avoiding cart abandonment.

Put general ads aside, and instead try to retarget shoppers with the specific products they were examining or adding to the shopping cart, and ensure that the shopping cart is not abandoned. You might not be able to prevent all cart abandonment, but you can still recover them using Facebook retargeting. 

A Facebook pixel can capture visitor behavior and store data while attaching a visitor (buyer) cookie.

And create an ad campaign on Facebook targeting specific audiences with customized messages to increase sales online, such as those who visited your site but neglected to check out. Present dynamic ads to them based on the products they viewed to win them back and avoid cart abandonment.

Remember: Retargeting is a fine line between stalking, marketing to your customers, reminding them of your store, and easily reaching the items they were previously interested in.

10- Keep the site crash-free

What if you entered your favorite store, and found many technical crashes in it, would it remain a favorite?  According to statistics, more than 15% of buyers tend to leave the shopping cart due to technical issues related to the site.

The simplest solution to this is to continue checking your site and the checkout process constantly to ensure everything is working correctly, to guarantee your customers stay on the site.

You need to check and optimize your site and its speed continuously. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site loading speed, and if it is slow, try to implement the recommended solutions as suggested by the tool.

You also need to make sure you use a good hosting service that provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee and uses the latest technology.

Also use a website monitoring service like Pingdom or Uptime Robot to track your site's downtime. These services will send you an alert whenever your site goes down, and they will also provide you with a monthly report so you know if your server hosting is good enough.

Concluding what we discussed:

You should know that the customer came to the store to complete an easy and fast purchasing process, so you must make the entire process, starting from browsing the product up to finishing the purchase stage, an easy process that does not take much time. What benefit is there if buying the product takes a lot of time that they could spend in a traditional store! This will definitely make them prefer the traditional store.

We cannot say that applying these strategies reduces the shopping cart abandonment rate to 0%, but they will certainly work to improve your situation, increase your sales, and gain customer satisfaction. 

Tell me, what is the first strategy you feel your store needs and you plan to implement first?