Online Shopping Cart Abandonment and Recovery

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During the first quarter of 2021, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate was 88 percent. While this is undoubtedly a problem for eCommerce marketers, don’t give up on those shoppers. An effective abandoned cart recovery strategy can turn browsers into loyal customers.

Once you understand the reasons behind cart abandonment and the research-based methods for recovery, you may find that winning these shoppers is a more practical solution than reducing your cart abandonment rate. Ideally, you would split your focus in both directions, but depending on your resources (e.g., developers, copywriters, budget, etc.), prioritizing recovery first may be more practical.

Why Do Shoppers Abandon Carts?
Before developing an effective abandoned cart recovery strategy, it’s necessary to understand why shoppers abandon carts. To help you do that, we’ve reviewed the latest studies and statistics to give you the information you need to run effective abandoned cart recovery campaigns.

Reasons for cart abandonment fall into two categories. The first category is comprised of internal factors. These reasons are primarily psychological (e.g., how the shopper thinks about online shopping).

External factors make up the second category (e.g., the time it takes to checkout).

External Factors
The external factors that influence shopping cart abandonment are primarily UI-related.

Many of these obstacles were identified by Baymard, an independent research institute, in a study asking shoppers who abandoned carts for the reasons why.

The most common response was “I was just browsing,” but Bamyard didn’t include this response in the final results because their objective was to identify ways to improve abandonment rates. The researchers felt that browsing behavior couldn’t be converted into buying behavior (at least not through UX improvements, which is the focus of their research).

The other reasons were:

Additional costs like shipping, tax, fees were too high (49 percent)
The website required the shopper to create an account (24 percent)
The estimated delivery time was too slow (19 percent)
The checkout process was too long or complicated (18 percent)
The shopper didn’t trust the site with their credit card information (17 percent)
The shopper couldn’t see the total order cost up-front (17 percent)
The website had errors or crashed (12 percent)
The returns policy wasn’t satisfactory (11 percent)
There weren’t enough payment methods (7 percent)
The shopper’s credit card was declined (4 percent)
This is useful data but remember: these percentages don’t include the number of people who abandoned a cart because they were just browsing. Not all of those abandonments represent lost sales; some of those shoppers never intended to make a purchase.

(Also, note that the percentages won’t add up to 100 because respondents were allowed to submit all of the reasons they had abandoned a cart over a three-month period.)

These findings are expanded on and partially supported by “The determinants of consumers’ online shopping cart abandonment,” a study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. The study found that using the shopping cart for research and using the cart for entertainment (each of which shoppers the shoppers in the Bamyard study likely considered “just browsing”) were the top factors of shopping cart abandonment, closely followed by cost concerns.

Internal Factors
Research into the factors that lead to cart abandonment has found that internal factors also cause shopping cart abandonment. A comprehensive strategy will need to take these factors into account to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Faux Shoppers
Many online “shoppers” are just digital window shoppers. The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science study cited above found that many shoppers aren’t shopping because they want to buy something. Instead, they put spain telemarketing data items in the cart for entertainment or research purposes.

These faux shoppers would likely have been the “browsers” in Baymard’s study. And, while the results of the Baymard study provide some direction for marketers looking to improve their shopping cart abandonment rates (e.g., offering free shipping), the faux shoppers who never had purchase intent may require a different approach.

Shoppers in the Wrong Mindset
Even when a shopper does intend to make a purchase, there are internal factors at play. A study published in The Journal of Consumer Marketing last year indicated that consumer mindset is another factor that influences whether a shopper ultimately makes a purchase.

The study, “Online shopping cart abandonment: a consumer mindset perspective,” found that shoppers who think about a product in abstract terms are less likely to abandon carts.

To explain the difference between abstract and concrete thinking, the researchers give the example of a consumer shopping for a vacuum.

A consumer in an abstract mindset would think about a vacuum as a good way to keep their carpet clean. In contrast, a consumer in a concrete mindset would consider specific details (e.g., the color of the vacuum cleaner). In other words, abstract thinking focuses on key attributes that are fundamental to the product, while concrete thinking focuses on ancillary characteristics (color, size, weight, etc.).

Why Do Your Shoppers Abandon Carts?
Based on the research above, we’ll provide guidance on how to reduce your cart abandonment rate. But each of these suggestions takes time to implement, and some may not be necessary.

Depending on your industry, current user interface, and other factors, the reasons your shoppers abandon carts may be ranked differently than the average ranking.

Many variables influence a shopper’s decision to abandon the cart, so the best way to prioritize where to focus your efforts is by conducting your own research.

You can do this by conducting a survey and reviewing your analytics data.

Identify Factors of Abandonment with a Survey
To discover what leads your shoppers to abandon the carts, ask them to complete a survey after or as they abandon the cart.

You can survey people whose emails are already in your CRM by using marketing automation. (For example, you could use a HubSpot workflow to email the survey to anyone who puts something in the cart but doesn’t make it to the payment confirmation page.)

But there are two problems with limiting your research to people who are already in your CRM. First, most of these shoppers are probably past customers. Their reasons could be very different than those of people who have yet to purchase from you. Second, it will take longer to gather enough data to be useful.

You can expand your research to include anonymous shoppers by:

1. Using a popup survey when a shopper demonstrates exit intent
This method delivers the survey when the reason behind the shopper’s decision to abandon the cart is still fresh in their mind. But most people don’t like popups, and since they’ve already decided to leave the site, you may not receive as many responses.

This survey could supplement your abandoned cart recovery campaign by offering free shipping or a discount in exchange for completing the survey.

2. Using website visitor identification to email the survey to anonymous shoppers
Website visitor identification collects the name and email address (along with other information) for up to 40 percent of your website visitors so that you can send them an email even if they haven’t provided it.

This option gives you another way to contact the shopper as part of an abandoned cart recovery campaign, and it may increase your response rate. But the shopper may be less likely to remember the reason they left the cart.

You can also use this email survey to supplement your abandoned cart recovery campaign by offering an incentive to entice respondents to come back and make a purchase.

Identify Factors of Abandonment with Analytics
Sometimes elements of the user experience like product descriptions and checkout time affect shoppers without their realizing it. For instance, they may be excited about making a purchase but lose their enthusiasm in the time it takes to checkout.

In that case, if you ask a shopper why they abandoned the cart, they’re more likely to attribute the abandonment to changing their mind rather than the time it took to checkout.

But you can use analytics data to gain insight into how your user interface affects your shopping cart abandonment rate.