How to Prevent Abandoned Carts in E-Commerce? Proven Strategies

Key points:

• The average e-commerce cart abandonment rate is a significant issue, hovering around 70.19%, which means businesses could potentially triple their income by eliminating this problem.
• The most common reasons for cart abandonment fall into three main categories: logistics (e.g., slow delivery, inconvenient returns), pricing (e.g., high delivery costs, extra fees), and user experience (e.g., website errors, lack of payment options).
• To reduce abandonment rates, businesses should improve logistics by partnering with experienced fulfillment providers, maintain price transparency by avoiding hidden fees, and enhance user experience by ensuring the website is fast and offers diverse payment methods.

Cart abandonment is one of the most common and biggest issues in the e-commerce sector. On the one hand, you cannot eliminate it; on the other, you want to reduce cart abandonment as much as possible. But why is it such a problem? To what extent can it haunt your business? What should you do to decrease it? Find out the answers in this article!

The Problem of Cart Abandonment

55%, 79.53%, 84.27%, 74%, and so on and so forth… It’s impossible to determine the exact rate of cart abandonment in e-commerce stores, as each source measures different stores in varying time periods. All of the numbers we mentioned are true according to some research. But do they prove anything?

Yes—they show how big of an issue cart abandonment is. According to Baymard Institute, which collects data on this specific problem, the average across 49 different sources and measurement times equals… 70.19%. The lowest score found was 55% (from 2010), while the highest equaled 84.27% (from 2020). Even if we take the average, this means that if you were to eliminate abandoned baskets, you would triple your income. So, abandoned carts are a major problem, and the better your solution, the more profitable your online store.

6 Most Common Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

Finding the solution requires a good understanding of the problem, which in turn means that you have to know what causes cart abandonment in your e-commerce store.
 

• 41% of online shoppers worldwide abandon their carts due to high delivery costs,
• 30% of online shoppers abandon their carts either due to extra costs at the checkout or because they found the item cheaper elsewhere,
• 24% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to slow delivery,
• 17% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to website errors,
• 16% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to inconvenient return policies,
• 13% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to a lack of satisfactory payment methods.

Based on this, we can divide the problem into three categories:
 

• logistics,
• pricing,
• UX.

How to reduce cart abandonment rates in your store? You need to address the challenges related to each of these categories.

Proven Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment

We’ve established why cart abandonment is a problem and what causes it. Now, let’s look at what you can do to decrease its impact on your e-commerce store. What’s effective?

Logistics

First, let’s look at logistics. In this case, your main problems are: return policies and delivery speed. The answer to both of them is simple: partner with an experienced international logistics company, such as Landmark Global. How can we help you overcome these challenges?

• Delivery speed—as a part of the bpostgroup, we have access to multiple storage and fulfilment facilities across the globe. Thanks to this, you can inject your products into the target market earlier on and provide your customers with delivery speed comparable to that of local e-commerce stores. Our infrastructure is located strategically to optimise routes and ensure maximum coverage in European, North American and Asian countries.

• Returns policy—having gathered extensive experience, we provide you with efficient and effective returns management solutions. You can build your policy around them, ensuring that returns are convenient for your shoppers and cost-efficient for your store.