What is Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Have you ever been out shopping at a grocery store, filling your cart with everything you need, when suddenly something, like an urgent phone call from work, a forgotten wallet or a screaming toddler, makes you leave everything right where it is and walk out of the store without making your planned purchase? 

As in real life, online shopping carts can get abandoned before a purchase is complete, for a variety of reasons. However, unlike a brick-and-mortar store experience, where shopping cart abandonment usually is the result of an impending emergency, it’s pretty common to leave an e-commerce site and abandon the items in your shopping cart for a variety of less dramatic reasons.

As an e-commerce retailer, understanding what causes people to abandon their shopping carts and leave your site without completing their purchase can lead you to make important changes that keep them shopping and help them follow through on the sale. Here are some of the main reasons shopping carts get abandoned on e-commerce sites and what you can do to keep customers engaged.

Reason #1: They get distracted

Hey, we’ve all been there. It’s easy to forget about the online purchase you were thinking of making when you suddenly receive a work call or a text from someone inviting you to lunch. There are plenty of reasons why a customer would simply forget and walk away midway through their online shopping experience. By using an AI chatbot to continuously interact with your customers throughout the purchasing process and give them little nudges and cues to remind them their cart still has an item in it, you can increase your chances of getting customers across the finish line with fewer distractions. Take a look at chatbot pricing to see which option is right for you.

Reason #2: They find a better offer

One advantage of online shopping is that you can compare shops for the same item on a different website in real-time. Unfortunately for online retailers, this means a higher chance of an abandoned cart. One good way to mitigate this issue is to offer your customers discounts with coupon codes to help lessen the cost of the item, giving you the advantage over a competing site.

Reason #3: They get frustrated

Have you ever tried to make a purchase online only to become so fed up with broken links, slow load time and confusing checkout processes that you just give up? If you are seeing an unusually high shopping cart abandonment rate on your e-commerce site, you may wish to have your web developer check for any of these annoying pitfalls and troubleshoot why your customers seem to be dropping off at certain points in the process.

By keeping these reasons top-of-mind, you can help solve your e-commerce site’s shopping cart abandonment issues, which can go a long way toward boosting your conversion rate and eventually your bottom line!