7 Ways to Reduce Cart Abandonment in Your Online Store

11 min read

About three out of every four customers will not make it all the way through online checkout.

Can you afford to let all but one-fourth of your potential customers slip away? Probably not.

When working to cut down cart abandonment in your online store, you’ll want to take a holistic approach that improves the customer experience from start to finish. It can be tempting to only look for quick-fixes, but in order for your strategy to be effective long-term, you’ll want to strive for improvements across various customer touchpoints.

Reducing cart abandonment in your online store should be a top priority for the year ahead — and there are some steps you can take to start improving it right away.

1. Be Transparent About Shipping Costs

Unexpected shipping costs are the leading cause of cart abandonment in the online shopping environment, which means transparency about shipping costs is essential.

Reasons for cart abandonment

It’s a good idea to include information about costs associated with shipping (and returns) right on the product page instead of surprising shoppers with a hefty fee once they arrive at the checkout screen.

Also, be sure your shipping costs (if not free for customers) are optimized. Making shipping costs highly accurate means your items are safely packed while keeping the cost as low as possible for you and your customers.

Flat rates relieve customers from both unexpected costs and calculations. If you want to reduce cart abandonment, try to find your average cost to be your flat rate.

Free shipping is also a great perk to offer your most loyal customers as a reward that keeps them coming back for more. For shoppers who reach a specific spending threshold, free shipping for the rest of the calendar year is an easy way to say “thank you” for their repeated purchases.

If you’re offering a free shipping promotion, make sure this is also noted across your online store (e.g. with free shipping icons or promo bars) — as this is a highly compelling offer for your shoppers.

2. Implement Pop-Ups

Another way you can reduce cart abandonment is by addressing customer concerns (and obstacles to purchase) with a pop-up. These notifications that appear front and center on your online store can help share an important piece of information, a special offer, or a message of urgency that keeps the shopper from abandoning his or her cart.

Via maxtraffic.com

There are several types of pop-ups you can deploy, but keep in mind that you should limit your use of these, as too many can be frustrating for a shopper. Experiment with one at a time to see which produces the best results.

A few different options include:

Exit popups: Appear when a customer navigates toward the exit button.
First time visitor popups: These offer a special deal or discount to new website visitors.
Offer popups: Promote special deals/sales/new items.
Email popups: Collect a site visitor’s email address so you can follow up later.

To create a pop-up that integrates seamlessly with your Ecwid store, try Easy Popup that offers a wide variety of customizable templates. Also, you can use Coupon popup to display your discounts on your website and Facebook.

3. Send Automated Emails

Following up with customers via email is a simple way to reduce cart abandonment. In fact, three-fourths of shoppers who have abandoned shopping carts say they plan to return to the retailer’s website or store to make a purchase. You can help them do it with your email.

With Ecwid’s abandoned cart recovery feature, you can setup automated or manual emails through that are sent to customers with unfinished orders.

Include a customized message that reminds shoppers they still have items in their carts and encourages them to come back and complete their purchase, and you can give that extra little nudge that some shoppers need.

Cart abandonment recovery emails in Ecwid

You can also use these emails as an opportunity to collect customer feedback and find out why shoppers aren’t following through. By default, the template includes your email and a call-to-action for contacting you in case of any problems.
Abandoned cart recovery email

This tactic is proven to work: E-commerce retailer Andrew Youderian found that by sending cart abandonment emails, he was able to recover 3-11% of orders on a month over month basis.

Set up cart abandonment recovery in your Ecwid store →

4. Retargeting With the Facebook Pixel or PPC Ads

Essentially, retargeted ads are ads that work to drive customers back to your store by showcasing products they’ve viewed through partner networks, like Facebook or Google. Using these avenues, you can remind shoppers of the items they’ve left behind and can help them circle back to finish the checkout process.

Via antoniocalero.com

When you use the Facebook pixel, a piece of Javascript code anonymously
“follows” your customers as they browse your store — and advertise to them later. And that retargeting efforts can boost site visits by 726% after four weeks of repeated exposure, as ComScore data shows.

In Ecwid, the integration with the Facebook pixel allows you to start using it in minutes without coding.

Learn more: Introducing the Facebook Pixel for Ecwid Stores: How to Run More Effective Facebook Ads Easily

You can also remarket to your customers on Google AdWords.

Via thesemarket.com

To do so, you’ll need to add Google Analytics to your store and connect it with your Google AdWords account.

You’ll also need to copy-paste a piece of code which is a bit more work than with the Facebook pixel, but if you follow our instructions, you’ll get it up and running very quickly.

If you want machines to take care of everything for you, simply install the Scaler Retargeting app — you won’t have to set anything up to start remarketing on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Display Network.

Important: When you turn remarketing in your store on, you start collecting some extra information about your store visitors, which means you have to warn them about it. Don’t forget to update your privacy policy to notify your customers.

5. Re-Vamp Your Checkout Process

If you’re currently using a checkout process with a large number of form fields, it may be time to re-think this approach, too.

Streamlined checkout processes with few form fields that can be quickly completed help the shopper move swiftly from shopping cart to order placed — but too many form fields can get in the way of that conversion process. Limit your form fields to only the essential data to keep customers moving forward.

Here’s a good example of a simplified checkout from online fashion retailer SheaKardel:

You should also consider adding an in-store pickup option when it makes sense, as this allows the customer to skip over entering shipping information and simply pick up his or her order at your retail location.

There are more ways to make checkout faster:

Connect PayPal Express Checkout to allow your customers to log into their PayPal accounts and simply use the already stored data in the account as their checkout information.
Master your Product Options to get all the necessary order details before the checkout.
Keep “Log in” links across your store so that your customers can log in and use pre-saved order details.

If your need to adjust your checkout process to fit your specific needs, you can address your request to Ecwid professional services.

6. Add Live Chat to Resolve Customer Questions Quickly

Another reason customers don’t complete the checkout process is because they have unanswered questions. However, by adding in a live chat support option, customers can quickly resolve issues that are keeping them from following through — and this means fewer abandoned carts.

Tools like Chatra that integrate with your online store help you implement this form of support quickly, easily, and affordably–and it even has advanced features that help you better understand your customers.

Don’t let ready-to-buy shoppers leave your site with questions. With a powerful live chat resource, you can keep your sales funnel moving at a steady pace.

Other live chats for your Ecwid store:

7. Add Long-Form Product Information and Specifications

Speaking of customer questions…

Data shows that 55% of cart abandonment was caused by lacking content. But with robust product descriptions and complete item specs, you can provide the level of detail a shopper needs to check out.

It’s best if every product description in your store has the same structure and all of them look homogeneous. That makes it easier to compare products and generally improves the look of the page.

Read how to: Two Ways to Quickly Fill Your Ecwid Product Catalog

Reduce Cart Abandonment, Make More Sales

Ready to capture those three-fourths of shoppers who are slipping away? Let’s do a quick recap of the ways you can reduce cart abandonment and make more sales through your online store:

Be transparent about shipping costs or offer free shipping
Leverage pop-ups
Stay in touch with automated emails
Retarget with PPC ads and Facebook Pixel
Simplify your checkout process
Add live chat
Include many product details

When you improve the customer experience as whole by making these changes, you’ll create more opportunities for shoppers to complete the checkout process — and you can keep them coming back for more.