Let’s talk shopping cart abandonment. But first a question. Are you sitting down? Seriously, are you? Why do I ask? Because when you hear this next statistic you’ll be shocked. At least if you are an online retailer. Which is a category the vast majority of businesses fall into today. Alright so here’s the stat.
The average shopping cart abandonment rate is just shy of 70%. Well 69.23% to be exact. What? No way. I said the same. But the data does not lie, at least according to a study by BayMard.com – Cart Abandonment Rates.
So why do people leave their shopping cart prior to checkout? Glad you asked. Here’s an infographic to help us understand this huge opportunity for sales growth.
The top three reasons are all fixable in some way or another. The fourth I honestly thought would have been higher, trying to figure out price. I do that myself when I can’t figure out shopping or to see if a coupon works.
In fact, if you factor out the fourth reason, trying to essentially figure out price, then everything else is fixable. Not the last one I guess, credit card declined.
Just imagine if the above problems were resolved. Right now for every ten shopping carts, only three are bought. Eliminating all of these problems would essentially triple your sales from where they are today. Insane.
What To Do
So what do you do? How do you get some of these lost sales back? There are a lot of things. First and foremost, visit your site. Make a purchase. Pretend to be a consumer. Then ask one simple question. Would you buy from you?
Does your site make buying via mobile easy. Dare I say enjoyable? If not, there’s another opportunity. Do you give the consumer all the info they need to make an informed decision. Do you encourage or inspire them to purchase?
You can always entice abandoned carts by following up with the consumer and a coupon. We all love coupons. But that’s a short term fix.
Conclusion
You need to understand some bigger structural changes you can make. Whether to your site, your pricing, product offerings and more.
The opportunity for growth is simply too great to ignore. 70%. Hard to believe. But true.