6 Causes of Shopping Cart Abandonment

There is one deadly disease striking down online shops of all shapes and sizes… SCA (Shopping Cart Abandonment)…

It can happen at any time, with seemingly no explanation. One minute, your customer has the item in their shopping cart and everything looks rosy, when suddenly… they up and leave the website! What went wrong?

With shopping cart abandonment rates at an average of 67% as of March 2014, this is not a phenomenon that can just be brushed off. At its core, this signifies a failure in conversion. Your website should be guiding customers through to a sale, and if they’re falling at the last hurdle then it’s time for a new strategy!

Another potential cause of this is the psychology of online shopping. No one is watching you, and no one will know if you just ditch your shopping cart to go off and have your dinner; it’s very different to doing the grocery shopping in a busy Tesco. If there’s no urgency to make the purchase, and no consequences to leaving your cart, why spend your money at all?

In 2010, Forrester Research found that a massive 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Why do they do this, and how do we combat it?

Well firstly, if you have an online shop, there are two things you need to keep in mind; shopping cart abandonment is going to happen, and you may never figure out the exact reason for every abandonment.

Statistics can only tell us so much. For instance, Google Analytics doesn’t tell us when a customer abandoned her cart because visitors came over, but she intends to return and finish the purchase when she remembers! What we can do, is design the website with the goal of conversion in mind, and make it as smooth and seamless for the customer as possible.

6 Ways to Improve Your Website and Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

We’ve looked into the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment, and followed them up with ways you can improve your website to combat it!

1. Lack of trust factors on your website

Viruses, scams and counterfeit products are just a few of the reasons why online shopping is not trusted and loved by all. As an online retailer, the challenge for you lies primarily in making your website look trustworthy.

You can do this with an attractive website design. Imagine you are trying to choose between two local dentists. One has a pristine, modern office exterior, whilst the other is dank, aged and the paint is peeling. You will likely choose the well-presented dental surgery, if there are no other factors involved! The same effect can be seen in websites, so put the effort in when designing, and it will pay off. 

Other ways of boosting the trustworthiness of your website are to include product reviews, familiar payment methods, familiar security icons and more. Keep things familiar for the customer, so that it almost feels like they've purchased from you before. And it should come as no surprise that the most important place to foster trust is during the checkout process; this is where most of your customers start to get nervous. 

2. Poor Website Usability

Consumers are used to a certain pattern when it comes to website use; typically the shopping cart is somewhere in the top right of the screen, there is an ‘add to cart’ button on each product page, and you review your cart before final purchase. The slightest change to any of these preconceived website norms could be deadly. If customers can’t figure out how to use your website, then you could lose them at any point, so make the whole process seamless, fluid and understandable.

3. Your checkout process is long and complicated

According to Conversion Voodoo, the average checkout process has 5.6 pages and anything longer can cause around 11% of shoppers to give up. A linear checkout process that clearly moves you from one step to the next is best, condensed into a maximum of 5.08 steps from ‘cart’ to ‘completed order’.

One way of upsetting the linear apple cart is to force customers to register before they can proceed with their purchase; this means they have to get off the shopping cart conversion train to visit the registration page. If you insist on them registering, incorporate it into the checkout process to help things flow.

And why 5.08 steps?

In a checkout usability study, 5.08 steps was optimal, whereas 6 steps or more just caused problems. When you get up to 9 steps, the study found it produced a negative usability score, so avoid this at all costs!

5. Surprising Shipping Charges & Unexpected Costs

Another common cause of the horrifying Shopping Cart Abandonment disease, is when you introduce your shipping charges in a sneak attack. There’s no point in trying to hide them; online shoppers are wise to the fact that shipping charges exist, and if you’re over-charging, you will lose customers.

A 2012 study by Statista found that 56% of customers abandoned their shopping carts because of unexpected costs, e.g. inflated shipping charges.

The solution here is to foster a transparent pricing system. Make your shipping prices clear, but also highlight everything they get for paying that amount, e.g. delivery method, date, tracking, signature required.

6. No Return Policy

Some online retailers believe a returns policy is like Fight Club, i.e. the first rule of the returns policy is we don’t talk about the returns policy. However, a clear and detailed returns policy on your website will actually encourage purchases, rather than inviting returns. Your customers can shop with peace of mind and confidence.

Psychologically, customers are anticipating buyers remorse when they make a purchase, so they search for anything that could counter those negative feelings; in this case, a returns policy offers them reassurance that they won’t be trapped.

Take a leaf out of Zappos’ book. They’re known as a reputable and reliable online shop, and have huge conversion rates to boot. And how do they turn customers into sales? They offer free shipping, free returns and a generous time frame within which to return items. This creates a lot of trust in their brand. If it’s financially viable for you, give it a go for a trial period and see if you notice a boost in sales!

These are just 6 of the possible factors contributing to Shopping Cart Abandonment. Some others include limited payment options, strict security options, difficulty locating the shopping cart, a bland and unfriendly checkout process & more.

Have you encountered any of these issues on an online shop? How did you react to it? 

At Vital Hike, we don't just build websites, we use online marketing strategies to make sure we build websites that work for you, so get in touch today to see what we can do for you. 

The Solution to Shopping Cart Abandonment

is Smart Online Marketing

With Vital Hike

Previous Blog:

Using Landing Pages to Get More Customers

Next Blog:
Some Google Results Have Pictures: But No Longer!