When shopping online, people often abandon the cart for various reasons. In this article, we will explore these reasons from the viewpoint of both customers and users. We can illustrate how customer experience impacts an individual’s buying decisions by looking at several examples.

What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Shopping cart abandonment is when somebody abandons a purchase before they reach the checkout. The rate of it happening is calculated by how many completed purchases are divided by all the initiated purchases.

Studies have shown that people have higher rates of shopping cart abandonment when using a mobile device compared to a desktop computer. It’s estimated that this occurs sixty to eighty percent of the time on various websites.

The checkout process is often frustrating for users, which leads them to abandoning the purchase. Among other things, it’s because of difficulties and/or dissatisfaction with the checkout process.

Why Does Shopping Cart Abandonment Happen?

Here are some of the most common reasons why people abandon their shopping carts before checkout.

No Up-front Info On Shipping & Taxes

As an online shopper, have you ever felt frustrated because a website does not provide a quick and clear estimate for delivery?

Studies show that the majority of shopping carts are abandoned due to people not knowing the shipping cost upfront. In most cases, the additional shipping costs would appear at a later stage of checkout.

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises. It’s important for a website owner to provide information upfront, or at the beginning of the checkout process, in order to have a conscious decision made by a user. That information would include delivery costs and other addons.

No Checkout as a Guest Option

Have you ever wanted to buy something from a site, but abandoned the shopping because the website required you to create an account to finish your purchase?

Customers can easily find out about a website without creating an account on it.

When customers realize, they need to sign up before their shopping experience can be completed, many abandon their cart.

According to the Baymard Institute, having to create an account is the second biggest cause for shopping cart abandonment. 34% of users say that they will abandon their cart if there is no option to checkout as a guest.

Customers are more likely to continue with their shopping and checking out if there is a fast-track option that can make the whole process easier. This is a great solution for customers who choose the fast-track option and save their information and create an account at the end of the process.

Too Much Info Needed to Create an Account

Let’s say you prefer to create an account instead of checking out as a guest. Let’s say you’re starting the process of creating an account, but the website is asking too many questions and require too much information that you don’t feel sharing or filling out.

Avoid this situation and ask customers and users only for essential info when creating an account. In most cases, an email address and password will suffice.

Complicated Checkout Process

Long checkout forms can make it quite tedious to finish the process. For example, do you remember how tedious it was when you were checking out online and had to fill in so many fields?

When filling out an online checkout form, it is best to only ask for essential information. This will ensure a smooth user experience and reduce the chances of the user abandoning your site. Get rid of non-essential fields and make it short and sweet.  Consider adding step-wise progress indicators so the user knows how much progress they have made.

Limited Payment Options

When the checkout screen requires credit card information and offers no other payment option, abandonment rates can be as high as 57%.

Having different payment methods according to your target market and customers is very important otherwise they won’t be able to buy your product. China is an important market; Chinese usually just use Alipay, Wechat pay or UnionPay. If you don’t include these three options in your website, many Chinese people might not support you.

Takeaway

One way to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate is to provide a customer service phone number on the actual product page. Companies also have the option to ensure that checkout pages are positioned as close as possible to product pages and are designed clearly in order to avoid confusion.

If TLDR:

• Provide shipping cost information upfront
• Enable checkout as a guest option
• 1Allow users to create an account with minimum information required like email and password only.
• Make checkout forms concise and easy to fill out.
• Provide multiple payment methods to cater to a larger audience and market

If shopping cart is abandoned, don’t give up. Send follow-up emails so that the abandoned cart can be recovered.

You can also use UX research to increase the conversion rate on your website and refer to our ecommerce case study for some design inspirations.

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