What to Do About Abandoned Shopping Carts Online

Q: What can I do about abandoned shopping carts on my site?

Neal Kaiser: As online browsing rates go up, so to do abandoned shopping carts. Abandoned shopping carts don’t necessarily mean lost sales — perhaps your e-commerce platform is unable to track across devices and recognize a customer browsing on their mobile device has switched to shopping on a desktop.

That said, there are a couple of easy steps you can take to minimize abandoned carts and they are all summed up by this: keep it simple.

Your goal should be to make your customer’s browsing-to-purchase experience as easy as possible. To that end, don’t surprise them with extra costs at the end; automatically save customer carts so that when they move from one device to another you can track them; simplify the checkout screen by allowing them to check out as a guest or a registered user; and offer a few, common payment options (i.e. credit cards and PayPal). If there are too many checkout screens or too many payment options to choose from, a customer may give up before purchasing.

Even with your streamlined checkout, customers may abandon carts. That’s where your re-targeting campaign comes in. Develop a series of emails to send to customers at intervals after cart abandonment. Data on the relative conversion success of re-targeting email varies wildly, but consistently demonstrates that re-targeting works. Work with your marketing team to create emails and ads that evoke your company tone and then use your cart reporting tools to deploy them to maximum effect.

Read more about cart abandonment on our blog at UpshotCommerce.com.

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