It’s rather mindblowing to think that two out of three shoppers go to the trouble of finding a product, adding it to their cart, and then abandoning their purchase!
And it’s a problem that needs to be analyzed because it means we are missing out on sales.
Today, I will share seven great tips for cart abandonment when dropshipping!
What is an abandoned cart?
Let’s start with understanding what cart abandonment means and how you can analyze your stats.
So, what is an abandoned cart?
An abandoned cart is when somebody is visiting your store, they’ve found a product they like, and they’ve added it to their cart. Next, they browse the store or get distracted by a phone call and leave the website. Which means they don’t proceed to checkout and complete the purchase.
What we need to work out is the cause. It could be something happening on your website, the quality of your traffic, or simply a customer who is browsing or distracted.
It will never be possible to rid ourselves of abandoned carts completely, but I hope the following tips will improve customer experience and increase your overall conversion rate.
The latest cart abandonment statistics
The Baymard Institute has tracked the global average cart abandonment rate for 12 years. The average cart abandonment rate currently sits at 69.5%.
Using several qualitative benchmarks, the study encountered 2,700+ instances of checkout usability issues. While we can’t do much to avoid cart abandonment resulting from “window shoppers”, we can resolve these issues.
Two stats from Baymard that particularly hit home for me were:
We can experience a 35.6% increase in conversion rate with a better checkout design.
The average mobile ecommerce cart abandonment rate is 85.6%. To remove all frustrations, we need to ensure our checkout is even more slick and user-friendly on mobile.
7 Tips to help you reduce cart abandonment
As you’ll agree, the causes of cart abandonment are multi-faceted, and it’s almost overwhelming to know what to fix first!
And if it is any consolation, cart abandonment happens to all online stores, from the most optimized slick brand to the one-person show.
Don’t wait. Get started now using these seven tips to reduce cart abandonment when dropshipping:
- Track shopping cart abandonment
We need to analyze our data to make decisions and take action. In most ecommerce platforms, you’ll have the ability to navigate to abandoned carts to find patterns that might suggest why customers are abandoning their carts.
Poor quality traffic, often from undeveloped countries with little spending power, often results in browsing rather than purchasing activity. Take a look at where your traffic is coming from.
Break down the data. Who are you targeting? Analyze the breakdown and start narrowing down on age, gender, country, and placement.
Be aware that while Instagram influencers can be fantastic for driving traffic, you cannot control customer location, which can increase abandoned carts when dropshipping.
Cart abandonment rate is simply the percentage of shopping carts that didn’t convert.
To calculate your cart abandonment rate, first calculate your cart conversion rate, just the number of completed purchases divided by the number of shopping carts opened.
- Automate to recover abandoned carts
It’s not all bad news! By setting up automated messages to your customers, you’ll be able to recover more sales on autopilot with no extra time needed from you or additional costs.
Email marketing
It would help if you reminded shoppers about their abandoned cart several times after they leave. The concept here is simple:
You can trigger an email workflow when someone adds an item to their cart but leaves your store without completing the purchase.
Your communication reminds the customer of their forgotten purchase and motivates them to complete the order by offering incentives.
Next, follow the steps to set up the automation for a guaranteed increase in conversion rate.
SMS marketing
This strategy is pretty straightforward and very effective. It only takes a few minutes for you to create an automated cart recovery campaign that reaches out to prospective customers through SMS.
You’ll need to write the messages you want to send your customers, then decide how long to wait before sending your initial SMS and follow-up message.
Web Push notifications
Not many businesses leverage the power of web push notifications, and I think there is scope to customize these to regain some of our customers.
The default opt-in box only offers the prompt “company name would like to send you notifications.” The user has the option to “allow” or “block.”
Imagine having the ability to customize this message with persuasive text and images conveying the benefits of receiving push alerts.
- Use retargeting ads
You have more than just one shot at converting a customer!
If someone adds to the cart but doesn’t purchase, you can remarket to them while browsing the web.
They’ll remind you of your products, and when they return to your website, you’ll take them straight back to their cart, where they can finish the transaction.
- Offer free shipping
As mentioned above, expensive costs were one of the main reasons customers abandon their carts before purchasing.
A beginner drop shipper is encouraged to offer free local shipping, but it is tough on the budget to provide free worldwide shipping before you have steady profits.
Some argue that you will attract more customers to offset these costs. It may be worth testing if the potential gains significantly outweigh the costs.
- Use exit-intent popups
An exit-intent popup is a technique that we can use to retain visitors who will leave the site. A visitor’s mouse movements track and a popup window is shown when the cursor moves outside the upper page boundary.
This is a great strategy but can be annoying and distracting to the visitor if the popup appears too soon.
Your exit-intent popup could take the form of:
A discount voucher encouraging completion of the order and collection of their email address.
Couple the discount voucher with an urgency timer encouraging completion of the order.
A reminder to the customer that they have something in their cart, showing the image of the product.
The popup does a great job of framing their value proposition for submitting an email (early access, exclusive sales), providing a timetable (only a minute), and minimizing the opt-out choice (“no thanks”).
- Enhance your checkout process
Analyzing and optimizing your checkout process is something you’ll want to pay attention to continuously.
Display product images at checkout
Using plugins or custom coding, displaying the product image at checkout optimizes conversions by reminding customers of their purchase items.
Therefore, it is advisable to include thumbnail images of your product throughout the purchasing phase.
Use popular payment gateways.
When designing your checkout, you don’t want anything to come in the way of a purchase. Depending on your country and the options available to you, try to offer several popular payment options.
In addition to offering credit card options, some customers like using Paypal. Options like Google Wallet and Apple Pay are popular with specific demographics.
Display credit card companies and security logos too. Building trust is critically important when asking customers to give you their credit card details and personal information.
Allow customers to check out as guests.
Although the checkout process is an opportunity to collect data from your users, forcing them to create an account can be a significant deterrent to purchase.
A better option would be to allow the customer to make the first purchase as easy as possible as a guest.
Then, instead of diverting them to a whole new flow at this critical time, you can offer the customer the option of creating an account after purchasing – if they love your store, they’ll come back and create an account.
- Optimize page speed
According to Visual Website Optimizer, ecommerce conversion rates drop seven percent for every one-second delay in your page loading.
At four seconds, you lose up to one-quarter of your visitors. More than one in three customers would have moved on at eight seconds. Particularly on mobile!
Optimize your images using something like Tiny PNG or similar. Limit the use of GIFS and social plugins.
It may seem obvious but remember to test your checkout process by purchasing one of your products (you can refund yourself later). There may be some obscure shipping setting, for example, that prevents people from buying.
Conclusion
It is shocking to read the stats about the average cart abandonment rate! Us store owners have our work cut out for us.
Now that we know why shoppers abandon their carts, there is a lot we can focus on to reduce cart abandonment when dropshipping.
Addressing these key points should help you reduce your cart abandonment rate and redirect a good portion of shoppers that don’t initially complete their purchase.
Wishing you luck in understanding your customer pain points better, reducing any friction that causes cart abandonment, and increasing conversions!