Shopping Cart Abandonment Stats by Industry, Geography & More

E-commerce has been growing rapidly over the year and this has prompted many traditionally brick and mortar businesses to take their products online. In US e-commerce sales had grown to 14.3% in 2018 of total retail sales from 5.1% in 2007.

However, putting in so much effort to get visitors on your site, laying out products they would like and taking pains for timely shipping and delivery. You realize 70% of the potential customers have abandon their carts. Turning these visitors into customers is whole new game.

What is cart abandonment?

Cart abandonment is when a potential customer shortlist the products, add them in the cart and starts a check out process for an online order but drops out of the process before completing the purchase. An item enters the shopping cart but never makes through the transaction is said to be cart abandonment.

There are several types of cart or basket abandonment across different sectors.

  • Booking Abandonment: When a customer begun to book a flight, hotel or travel products but left without completing the transactions
  • Form Abandonment: It is commonly refers to the abandoning forms for quotes, subscriptions and financial products. The form requires a lot of information to be filled and they are also time consuming that some customers leave the process without completing it
  • Browse Abandonment: It refers to those shoppers who browse a site, views categories pages and products but leave without placing items in cart or making the purchase. 43.8% customers browse pages on retail sites but don’t add products to carts or make purchase

For a retailer every abandoned cart is a missed or delayed opportunity for revenue. For all online retailers combined US$4 trillion in shopping cart were abandoned and that means a little increase in the conversion rate can impact the revenues significantly

Some Facts on cart abandonment

  • Abandonment costs e-marketers about US$2 to US$4 trillion per year
  • Checkout optimization can recover US$260 billion in ecommerce sales
  • The average cart abandonment rate increased a little in 2018 to 69.6% compared to 69.2% in 2017 while highest cart abandonment recorded at 72.0% in 2012
  • Cart abandonment rate increases to 77.8% for mobile users while for desktop and tablet users it stands at 67.0% and 70.0% respectively.
  • APAC region sees the highest abandonment rate at 76.3% followed by the Middle East at 76.1% and Latin America at 75.3%

 

  • In 2018 Airlines sector saw the highest abandonment rate followed by travel and finance sectors with 81.3% and 78.0% respectively

Reasons customers abandon shopping carts

 

Baymard conducted a survey that included 2,584 consumers in 2019 and identified 10 reasons for cart abandonment during checkout

  • High extra cost:0% said the unexpected costs like shipping charges, taxes and fees were too high and they were not aware of until checkout
  • No Guest checkout option:0% said they were prompted to create a new account and there was no guest checkout option
  • Complexity:0% said they found the checkout flow is too complex or time consuming and due to this they abandon the cart
  • Can’t see total cost: 21.0% said they couldn’t see or calculate their total order cost upfront
  • Didn’t trust the website: 0% said they did not trust the website with their credit card information
  • Website error or crashes: 0% responded said the website had error or crashed while checkout
  • Delivery too slow:0% said delivery of the product were too slow than they expected and there was no express shipping available
  • Return policy: 0% said the return policy was unsatisfactory. Many retailers put hard limits on their returns such as policy that do not allow return, policies that charge for the return in the form of shipping
  • Lack of payment options: 0% said they could find the desired mode of payment they would like to pay and due to this they abandon the cart
  • Card Declined:0% said their credit card were declined during checkout process and they were forced to abandon the card.

Steps to reduce the shopping cart abandonment

 

  • Low cart value has high abandonment rate as they have to pay shipping charges while high value cart does not attract shipping charges. It is very important to disclose the full cost and another strategy is to bundle the extra cost of shipping into the product price and offer free shipping. Free shipping is critical for 73.0% customer while it encourages 93.0% customers to buy online.
  • Checkout is not the best time to ask for account creation and that leads to 34.0% customers to abandon the cart. Guest checkout option should be available to the customers
  • The average US checkout process includes almost 24 form elements such as form fields, checkboxes etc. Efforts should be made to reduce the form elements. 1.0% or more customers abandon a cart just because they don’t want to enter the CAPTCHA
  • Prove you are a trustworthy store through use of social proof, use customer testimonials, product reviews, endorsements. The retailer should also display badges like Norton secured or Verisign to build trust among customers
  • Customer experience is paramount. It is important to maintain website speed, website optimisation through different devices and different screens. According to ReadyCloud, cart abandonment increases by 7.0% for each second the site takes to load.
  • Consider popular payment options such as third-party payment companies like PayPal, device-based wallets like Apple Pay, Retailer based wallets like Amazon Pay
  • Provide express shipping option. Customers are willing to spend more for expedited shipping and you will benefit a lot from providing this option
  • Launch e-mail campaign to target those customers who have abandon their carts. Nearly 50.0% of all cart abandonment e-mail are opened and 6.0% to 13.0% of cart abandonment mails are clicked and over 33.0% of those clicks results in a purchase

References:

1)       Salecycle.com/link

2)       Baymard.com/link

3)       Barilliance.com/link

4)       Creditdonkey.com/link

5)       Optimizely.com/link

 

6)       Digitalcommerce.com/link

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Researched by Brian and SaaS Scout team
Researched by Brian and SaaS Scout team

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