What is an abandoned checkout?
An abandoned checkout is a situation in which one of your customers adds a product to their cart, proceeds to the checkout step, enters all their information, and then decides to not make the purchase. The shopper goes through the entire buying journey, searching for the product (or engaging with an advertisement on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media), visits your online store to look at your offerings, explores your shop to take a closer look at several of your offerings to see if you have anything that they do want at a price that they are comfortable with, finds something they would like to purchase, adds the product to their cart, starts the checkout process by entering their shipping and payment information, but then decides against making the purchase and just quits the buying process at that point.
How is checkout abandonment different from cart abandonment?
The main difference between checkout abandonment and cart abandonment is that checkout abandonment involves the customer reaching the checkout stage and entering their information before they change they mind and abandon their purchase, while cart abandonment involves the customer adding products to their cart and then abandoning the cart at any stage that comes before the checkout stage.
Checkout Drop off
Checkout drop off is the rate at which shoppers abandon their cart during the checkout process. High checkout drop off is a problem for e-commerce businesses, as it results in lost sales and revenue. A number of factors contribute to checkout drop off, including high shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, lack of trust, lack of payment options, distractions, comparison shopping, and unexpected costs. To reduce checkout drop off, businesses can try to identify the root causes of the problem and take steps to address them. This might include simplifying the checkout process, offering a variety of payment options, providing clear information about costs and fees, and building trust with shoppers through secure payment processing and clear privacy policies.
Reasons for abandonment during checkout:
There are many reasons why a user might abandon their cart during the checkout process. Some common reasons include:
- Mandatory account creation -
- Complicated checkout process: A long or complicated checkout process can be annoying for the customer and cause them to abandon their cart. A short and simple check out flow can optimize user experience.
- Lack of trust: If a user does not trust the website or is concerned about the security of their personal and financial information, they may be more likely to abandon their cart.
- Lack of payment options: If a website does not offer the convenient payment option that the customer prefers, they may abandon their cart at the checkout page.
- Payment security concerns - A lot of people still haven’t put their complete faith in online payments or simply don’t prefer online payments. Not providing CoD options can discourage people from shopping from your store and hence lead to checkout abandonments.
- Distractions: Interruptions or distractions during the checkout process, can lead to abandoned carts.
- Comparison shopping: The shopper may be considering other options and decide to abandon their cart in order to continue researching.
- Unexpected costs: If the shopper is surprised by additional costs (e.g. taxes or fees) at the end of the checkout process, they may abandon their cart.
- No discounts or promo codes that can be used - People love discounts, if you charge heavy shipping fees and handling charges and if the product is very
- Longer delivery times - A customer may need an urgent delivery than the stipulated time, they might not have any use of the product if it’s not going to be delivered on time.
- Complicated return and refund policy - Lack of touch and feel has already caused people to stay away from online purchases. A good return and refund policy helps instill trust in online businesses. Without this, it’s difficult for businesses to convince customers to buy from them.
How do you deal with abandoned checkouts?
Review your abandoned checkouts
If you want to recover abandoned checkouts or reduce the number of abandoned checkouts that you have to deal with in the first place, you need to find out why they’re happening. You need to try and understand why checkouts are being abandoned by your customers. To get an idea about the main reasons why abandoned checkouts take place, you should review your abandoned checkouts to detect patterns that could show you why your customers aren't completing orders.
1. How to see abandoned carts in Shopify?
If you’re looking for Abandoned cart data on Shopify, these abandoned checkouts are saved in the Shopify admin section for three months. Every Monday, abandoned checkouts that are more than three months old get removed from your admin.
To go there, you’ll have to go to your Shopify admin, click on ‘Orders’ and then click on ‘Abandoned checkouts’.
2. How to delete abandoned checkouts Shopify?
Yes, you can delete abandoned checkouts on Shopify. If you have an unused or unclaimed checkout, you can delete it from your shop's Checkouts page. To do this, go to your shop's Checkouts page, find the checkout that you want to delete, and then click the Delete button next to it.
View payment events from your abandoned checkout
In Shopify, every time a customer attempts to pay for an order, a payment event gets noted in the history of the abandoned checkout. You can even expand payment events to get more details.
This information can be very useful if your customers are attempting to place an order and the payment fails. If the customer gets in touch with you because their payments don’t work at checkout, you could take a look at the details of the payment event and then use the information that you found to help your customers. But if a customer successfully paid at checkout, you could instead go to the order's timeline to view payment events.
The steps for you to do this involve:
- Going from your Shopify admin to Orders and then to Abandoned Checkouts.
- Clicking on an Abandoned checkout
- Scrolling to history
- Clicking a payment event
Email your customers
You’d want to send out promotional emails to shoppers who abandon checkouts. Remind them that they haven’t completed their purchase and offer them the chance to go back and continue their purchase. The easiest way for you to do this is by sending them a link that takes them to the exact stage they were at before they left. It’s also really helpful if you could offer them a small discount to incentivize them to make a purchase as well.
You could choose to manually send these emails yourself, or even set up a flow that automatically triggers a checkout abandonment email whenever your customers abandon checkouts.
Another powerful way to get these customers to go back and complete their purchases would be to personalize your abandoned checkout recovery emails or at least play on the insights that you’ve gathered when you review your abandoned checkouts.
Shorten your checkout process
People hate long and winding checkout processes. After they make the purchase decision, they want to make the actual purchase as quickly as possible and then get on with their day without needing to wait any longer. There’s also the fact that a longer checkout process offers your shoppers more time and chances to rethink their purchase decision and change their mind about buying that product from your store. Shortening your checkout process and reducing the number of steps involved in it can reduce the frustration that customers experience and even give them fewer opportunities than they had earlier to reconsider their purchase decision.
Display progress indicators on the checkout page
This builds on the previous point. People don’t want to go down a long, stretched out checkout process. They’re literally afraid of having to do that. And if they suspect that they’ll have to deal with such a process, they might just not go ahead with it at all. So, how do you convince them to keep going? The answer is to show them how far they’ve come and let them see that they’ve nearly reached the end. Include a progress indicator on the page to get them to keep going and complete the checkout process instead of abandoning their purchase.
Use conversion triggers
Sometimes your customers might just end up quitting the buying process because they decided that they don’t want to pay that much for a product. These are the customers that you can convert with the least effort. If you have a Shopify store and use the Engati app, your chatbot can shoot out a call-out message with a discount or promotional offer on your store’s screen itself as soon as a customer removes a product from their cart.
Recovery messages on WhatsApp
Email is the traditional route for abandoned checkout recovery messages, but it’s not the most effective one. Marketing emails only have an open rate of 40%, but WhatsApp messages have an open rate of 99% and an engagement rate of 70%. You can use your WhatsApp chatbot to send out message templates to your customers with discount offers which increases your odds of recovering those carts far more than an email could.
Show total savings at checkout
Customers love savings, if you’re providing free shipping or running any discounts, it’s a very good idea to show the total savings to your customers, it’s a positive affirmation and shows how much value is being added to their purchase.
Offer live chat support
Customers might have issues or concerns about their purchases, if these issues aren’t solved in time, your customer will simply leave your website. Having live chat support will help your customers get such queries and doubts resolved quickly, which will avoid checkout abandonments.
Pro-tip: The live chat agent can also step in as a sales agent and help with upselling or cross-selling items.
Add social proof signals
Collecting reviews and testimonials from your customers will help you build trust amongst other future customers. Not having reviews or having less reviews might create a negative impression of your brand/product which might discourage customers from completing the purchase.
3 Marketing Hacks to Combat Cart Abandonment.
- Retargeting - Retargeting customers who have abandoned their carts is easier, cause they have already shown purchase intent before, they might have abandoned cart for one of many reasons. You can remind them about their abandoned purchase or even offer a small discount to get them back and finish their purchase.
- Optimize page load times - Ensure that your website, which is your brand’s front is perfectly optimized. Slow web pages will kill your sales, customers aren’t very patient and if it takes a lot of time they might just bounce of your website.
- Create urgency - You can notify customers about their abandoned purchase and create urgency by offering a limited time discount on their purchase. This can increase the chances of them coming back quick and completing their purchase.
FAQs
1. How to calculate cart abandonment rate?
You can calculate your cart abandonment rate by dividing the total number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created.
2. Why do I have so many abandoned checkouts?
There could be various reasons as to why you get a lot of abandoned checkouts, slow webpage, reliability of your products, high costs, no discounts etc. You should work on making these things better and lower your abandoned checkouts
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