Abandoning the shopping cart is no longer a private problem that only some online store owners grapple with; rather, it has become a common problem faced by the largest stores at high rates daily. According to a recent statistic, the cart abandonment rate reaches about 77.24%, meaning that out of every ten people who enter the store, seven of them leave the shopping cart without completing the payment process.  

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This is a very high percentage that inflicts heavy losses on many stores, especially those that do not take quick measures to reduce these rates. Therefore, online store owners need to arm themselves with strategies and solutions to confront this problem, the neglect of which causes heavy losses to your store.  

Therefore, in this article, we will provide you with 10 strategies that have effective and proven results by many major stores, to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, and increase sales. But before we start, let's define what is meant by abandoning the cart first:

What is Cart Abandonment?

The term abandoned carts is one of the most prominent terms and challenges associated with e-commerce, which causes great concern to store owners. 

Shopping cart abandonment refers to a customer who enters the online store, places several products inside the shopping cart, but leaves the cart before completing the purchase process. There may be many types of shopping cart abandonment, but the electronic payment completion stage is considered the stage during which the cart is most abandoned. 

Abandoning the shopping cart means more missed sales opportunities, and many lost customers. Therefore, we cannot neglect searching for the main reason why customers leave carts on your online store. This enables you to address the problem and turn it into an opportunity to gain more sales, and retain customers for as long as possible.

How to Activate the Abandoned Cart Reminders Feature on Salla

The Salla platform cares about helping its clients retain customers who abandoned their shopping carts, which is why we added the abandoned cart reminders feature on Salla stores, which you can activate on your online store in simple steps:

1. Go to your store account on the Salla platform

2. Through the side control panel, select the Abandoned Carts icon

   3.  Select Create a New Reminder

 4- With the reminder feature, you can send discounts on abandoned carts to your customers automatically and without any effort from you

5- Simply, you can set the reminder conditions as you wish.

10 Strategies to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate and Increase Sales

Every problem has a solution, even shopping cart abandonment. Although you cannot reduce abandonment rates to 0%, you can reduce them significantly by identifying and fixing areas of deficiency in your store. Now, before we see how you can do that, let's classify the reasons for leaving the shopping cart, so that we can put things in their proper place.

The reasons for abandoning the shopping cart can be classified mainly into the following areas:

• Trust issues.

• Problems with payment methods.

• Problems related to using the website.

• Shipping-related problems.

If we can address these issues in a systematic and organized manner, we will be able to significantly reduce the cart abandonment rate, and correct product shopping methods play a major role in retaining customers.

1- Use Email 

The losses of online store owners resulting from cart abandonment are estimated at $4 trillion annually, yet smart store owners can recover 63% of abandoned cart profits through email campaigns. Abandoned cart emails are among the most prominent successful strategies; because they are the direct way to communicate with the customer after leaving the cart, and they are also an excellent way to provide a positive experience for them as part of the process of recovering them to the site. There are many automation tools that can do this job on your behalf. 

Sending customized messages to customers who abandoned their cart, and persuading them to complete the order, based on experience, leads to a significant reduction in the abandonment rate, but there are some practices you can do to ensure a successful email campaign, which are: 

1- An Email with an Catchy Subject Line

Tell me how many times you opened an email because its subject line was attractive to you? Many times, for sure. 

Writing a subject line that grabs buyers' attention can sometimes seem like a difficult task, and it can be easy when you remember that you need to evoke buyers' emotions.

I'll give you some examples that make buyers stop for a moment to read your message:

• Don't miss this offer.

• It seems you forgot something important.

• Products waiting for you to acquire them.

• There is a surprise for you here, open it now.

Here are examples of catchy and somewhat playful subject lines, like the one in the picture.

Did you know that this might be the right time for you to respond to buyers' objections regarding your product? How?

Formulating an email campaign with an attractive title that talks about the product's features, and why it is the suitable product for them. This might be a successful way to bring customers back again and prompt them to fill the shopping cart with your product, learn about the most famous search engines.

2- Remind Buyers of Abandoned Items

Reminder emails are useful and influence purchasing decisions. It is possible that the buyer left the cart due to something sudden or urgent (and it actually happened to me, while browsing the products of a famous online store, the power went out for seconds). Therefore, it is nice to remind them of these items. 

If they left it voluntarily for some reason, one way to prompt these shoppers to buy is by including images of the items they left in their carts. 

Send these reminder messages at successive intervals as follows:

• First reminder 24 hours after leaving the cart.

• Second reminder 48 hours after leaving the cart.

• Third reminder 72 hours after leaving the cart.

Don't worry about sending many messages; some stores organize an electronic campaign consisting of seven reminder messages to recover customers who abandoned their carts.

Note: Track the change rate on buyers to know which part of the campaigns is achieving effective results, and the appropriate duration to continue sending messages. The important thing is to always test many practices to determine the best among them, also check out strategies for targeting new customers.

3- Use an Incentive to Encourage Buyers to Purchase 

Buyers are easily attracted to incentives that enable them to get the products they love. These incentives may consist of a discount, free delivery and shipping, or a gift. Therefore, experts advise you to use this strategy; if you sent reminder messages and received no response, you will find satisfying results then, you can learn about branding strategies.

Warning: Use discounts wisely and do not overdo them, as they may reduce the value of your brand and decrease your profits in the long run. 

2- Provide Different Payment Options 

18% of users abandon the shopping cart for reasons related to financial security, and inability to disclose their financial data to stores that provide only one payment method. This is reason enough to push online stores, especially small ones, to provide secure payment options for buyers, learn about the best payment gateways

Associating the name of a large online store with a famous payment method is an assurance to buyers that their financial information will be safe from hackers.

You must also keep in mind that not all buyers have the same payment methods; indeed, in some countries, certain payment methods are blocked. Therefore, the user may abandon the cart despite being satisfied with the products, because the payment options are not suitable for them. You can add many financial options such as credit card - Visa - MasterCard - PayPal… and others.

The following image from IKEA shows how they use multiple payment options to ensure a comfortable user experience.

The various payment options you offer must be secure and reliable; to create a state of transparency and trust between you and the buyer.

Additional tip: Since we have touched on the financial part, I would like to give you this advice, which is to be upfront with the customer regarding anything related to the financial part and costs. They should not be surprised by additional costs upon receipt. They must be aware of all details before the payment process.

If you add extra costs that you did not inform the customer about, this could be a severe blow to the trust between you, especially if the customer is dealing with you for the first time. This action will make them hesitant before buying from you again and they might decide not to enter your store ever again. 

3- Optimize the Shopping Cart 

At first glance, you might feel that this strategy is unrelated to the core topic, but in reality, optimizing the shopping cart to provide many options for the buyer is an important factor in reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate. You can optimize the cart as follows:

• Make it capable of saving items selected by customers; a customer may leave the shopping cart due to a glitch or an urgent circumstance, or to browse another site to compare prices, shipping, and delivery costs. Upon returning to your site, they might be too lazy to put the items back into the cart and close the site.. This means you lost a potential customer, but with an option like this, you will work on retaining them.

• Make the cart icon visible on all store pages; it might seem like a small detail, but it is useful in the long run.

• Make the number of selected items visible on the cart icon.

• Make it easily editable. Remember that after finishing the purchase process, the customer might change their mind about buying a certain item; they must be able to do this smoothly without hassle. 

In the following image from BestSelf store, look where the arrow points, you will find that the cart icon is visible on all store pages in the same format, showing the number of items that have been added. 

4- Invest in Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that 90% of internet browsing processes are done through smart phones, and that more than 90% of shopping processes are done through smart phones as well. Therefore, any site whose design is not suitable for smart phones and not easy to use will be out of competition in e-commerce.

The thing that will encourage you the most to pay attention to this step is knowing that 25% of shoppers abandoned the shopping cart due to the difficulty of browsing the store.

Additional tip: Also invest in optimizing usability and user experience (UX). These two factors play a major role in determining how long the user will stay on the site or application.

You need to test your site, especially checkout pages, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and payment pages, on both the smart phone screen version and the web screen version; to ensure your site works efficiently.

Practical step: You can easily conduct these tests using sites like ready.mobi and mobiletest.me.

This test will reveal if there are any difficulties users might face while using your site.

For example: the test will show you if buttons or links are too close, to the point that a user might click the wrong links. Keep in mind that great features like pop-ups that look excellent on the web version can cause scrolling issues on the mobile screen version.

After discovering the deficiencies for which we have shown examples, you must seek the help of an expert to guide you to the best practices that eliminate these problems, and you should not rely solely on the tests of these sites. E-commerce platform

5- Utilize Exit-Intent Pop-ups (Exit Pop-up)

There is another easy way to reach customers at the last moment before the shopping cart is abandoned, which is using pop-ups. Often, customers decide they want to do more research before making a purchase.

You can use pop-ups to include exit messages from your store pages; these messages reduce cart abandonment and increase your sales. This strategy is implemented by LC Waikiki store as shown in the picture.

An exit message strategy must include something of value to offer to customers if they decide to leave your site. These messages can include the following:

• Discounts.

• Free shipping and delivery offers.

• Contests.

• Discounts on additional items.

You do not need a pop-up with exit messages on every page of your site, but you must definitely include them on product pages and checkout pages. Make sure they are eye-catching and the offer is appealing enough to entice your customers to complete their transactions.

6- Create a Sense of Urgency to Buy

One of the tried and trusted ways marketers use to encourage customers to complete the purchase process is creating a sense of urgency.

This strategy is based on the FOMO principle, which stands for Fear Of Missing Out. 

This can be done through the following:

•  Adding a countdown timer to the product: AMAZON implements this strategy; if a customer wants a specific product by a certain date, they must order it within 10 hours and 18 minutes, for example.

• There is another way to let your customers know when a product is running out of stock. If it shows that only one item of it is left in stock, you are creating a sense of scarcity that forces people to act accordingly. Consequently, they make the decision to buy because they do not want to miss out on anything.

• Using phrases that indicate this, such as: limited-time discounts, hurry up to catch the offers, ends tomorrow. 

The following example shows how the ban.do store uses the FOMO principle: 

7- Provide a Money-Back Guarantee Feature 

Although e-commerce is growing and thriving amazingly, a large segment of people has not fully adapted to it; this makes one of the reasons people back out of the purchase decision at the last moment is the fear of wasting money. Many questions urge people, such as: What if the product is not of the quality I expect? What if the size is not suitable? What if I change my mind after inspecting the product in reality?

To put doubts to rest and reassure people, you can provide a feature for the customer to return their money within a specified period if they do not like the product, such as 90 days from the date of receiving the product. This strategy suggests to the customer that you are giving them more value for their money, and you seek to gain their satisfaction in the first place. 

Note: Some stores offer a lifetime warranty feature for the product. This is considered a token of trust and integrity that makes the customer buy without any fear or anxiety. 

8-  Provide Guest Checkout Feature (Allow Guest Checkout)

The most boring part of online buying is filling out payment form fields, and this can become even more boring when the payment form is very long or asks for unnecessary information.

People want an easy and fast buying experience; what is the point of having a series of tiring steps for buyers? Imagine that 31% of buyers tend to abandon the shopping cart when they find they need to fill a long series of account registration steps before buying the product. To eliminate the problem of abandoning the shopping cart, provide the option to view the product and pay to get it as a guest, i.e., without registering an account. Provide the option to view the product and pay to get it as a guest, i.e., without registering an account.

If you want customers to register an account on the site, you must first give them an opportunity to buy the product and then ask them to create an account, or you can integrate the login process into the purchase process without complexities or tiring steps, as a large group of stores do.

You can hire an expert to help you place only the payment process fields you need, to avoid any details that the user might get bored with, and you can try for yourself how the fields look and whether they are essential or can be eliminated. 

Some points that must be available on the checkout page:

1- The design of the checkout page must match your site's look and style in terms of layout and colors. Likewise, it must be professionally designed with the user in mind. The form should be short and easy to fill, and contain an input validation feature to easily capture any error for the customer to fix.

2- There must be clear and prominent call-to-action buttons, so it is better to distinguish the purchase buttons from the rest of the buttons for the customer to see easily.

3- The checkout page must also contain a prominent image of the product, and must contain information about the product cost, shipping costs, and taxes (all financial costs) as previously mentioned, and the delivery date.

4- The shopping cart must be easy to edit, so that the customer is able to remove products from the cart, change quantities, or change other variables such as color, size, etc. (when needed).

5- The checkout page must also contain signals that reassure the customer along the way, such as security information, because what worries customers most is insecure transactions.

6- Place a progress indicator for the customer, which shows the component parts for completing the payment process, such as personal data, payment method… reviewing the order to ensure the correctness of their information. Here is an example to make the idea clear in the picture.

A tip for excellence: If you want your store to stand out with a unique feature, you can provide a product tracking feature so that the customer is kept informed of the stage the product has reached; since many customers are in a state of anxiety and anticipation for the product's arrival time. Provide them with this feature and your store will be at the top and the shopping cart will not be abandoned.

9- Leverage Retargeting 

I mentioned to you a short while ago that 63% of smart store owners recover customers. By using retargeting, you bring qualified potential customers back to your store, and this can have a greater impact when you make retargeting ads customized to a segment of customers, and prevent abandoning the shopping cart.

Put general ads aside, and instead try to retarget shoppers with the specific products they were inspecting or adding to the shopping cart, and ensure they do not abandon the shopping cart. Maybe you cannot prevent some cart abandonment processes, but you can still recover them using retargeting on Facebook. 

The Facebook pixel can capture visitor behavior and store data while attaching the visitor's (buyer's) cookie.

And create an ad campaign on Facebook targeting specific audiences with customized messages to increase online sales, such as those who visited your site but neglected to make the payment. Offer dynamic ads to them based on the products they viewed to bring them back again and prevent abandoning the shopping cart.

Remember: Retargeting is a fine line between stalking, marketing to your customers, reminding them of your store, and easily reaching items they were previously interested in.

10- Keep the Site Free of Glitches

What if you entered your favorite store and found many glitches in it, would it remain a favorite?  According to statistics, more than 15% of buyers tend to abandon the shopping cart due to technical issues related to the site.

The simplest solution to this is to continue checking your site and the checkout process constantly, to ensure everything is working properly, to guarantee your customers stay on the site.

You need to check and optimize your site and its speed continuously. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site's loading speed, and if it is slow, try to implement the recommended solutions as suggested to you by the tool.

You also need to make sure you use good hosting that guarantees a glitch-free uptime of 99.99% and uses the latest technologies.

Also use a website monitoring service like Pingdom or Uptime Robot to track your site's downtime. These services will send you a message whenever your site goes down, and they will also provide you with a monthly report so you know if the server hosting is good enough.

In conclusion to what we covered:

You should know that the customer came to the store to complete an easy and fast purchase process, so you must make the entire process, starting from browsing the product to ending the purchase stage, an easy process that does not take much time. What is the benefit if purchasing the product takes them a lot of time that they might spend in a physical store! This will definitely make them prefer the physical store.

We cannot say that implementing these strategies reduces the shopping cart abandonment rate to 0%, but they will certainly work to improve your situation, increase your sales, and gain customer satisfaction. 

Tell me what is the first strategy you feel your store needs and you intend to apply first?