Why 69,5% of your online shopping carts are abandoned - and how to improve this
On average, 69,5% of your webshop visitors put something in their basket only to leave your website without finalising the purchase. Imagine how this would look in your garden centre: It would be chaos and you would probably be bankrupt within a few months time.
Abandoned shopping carts and payment issues have been on our radar for a long time since it happens so often. Luckily, it’s easy to fix and can improve your online sales significantly.
In this blog, I will go through why this happens and how a simple e-mail can generate a huge return on investment.
1. Why do people leave their cart?
The Baymard Institute did some research on this topic and their survey show the following issues:
As you can see, additional costs like shipping fees, taxes and costs for payments are the main reason why people pull out and leave your webshop. Another reason for consumers to exit is mandatory account creation: we’re pretty sure you’ve experienced this yourself and it’s indeed very annoying!
We recommend being very clear about the delivery costs on every page of your webshop. Don’t hide this information: it will only annoy your webshop visitors because the will eventually see it anyway.
Warbreck Home & Garden is doing it the right way. They currently offer local deliveries only and they communicate this twice on the product page:
2. How to improve trust?
A lot of the reasons mentioned above are related to trust:
- Are you processing my credit card details in a safe and responsible manner?
- Will you deliver the products on time and as promised?
- Can I return the product if it doesn’t suit my requirements?
There are many ways to build more trust. We always recommend showing information about payments, deliveries and returns as clear as possible. A good example is Cowell’s Garden Centre, they do this on all of their product pages:
However, customers are probably not going to read your policies and terms & conditions since it’s pretty boring to read. The best way to build trust is to have positive reviews from other consumers.
Frosts Garden Centres uses Trustpilot to collect and display reviews to build trust:
3. Reducing abandoned shopping carts
So how can you get customers who abandoned their shopping cart back to your webshop? At Garden Connect, we use a two-step approach to make this happen and to generate extra revenue.
The first step is temporarily storing the email during the checkout process. Even if they don’t enter their home address we can still save their details. The second step is to send an e-mail to the customer if they don’t finalise their order within 2 hours. We also store the information of customers who tried to make a payment but who experienced issues.
In both cases, we send them an e-mail, the abandoned shopping cart reminder, which includes a link to quickly finish the order:
The results
We’ve been sending out these automated emails for a while and the results can be tracked in Google Analytics. For example, this garden centre was able to generate an extra turnover of £1,804.99 in 30 days:
Please note: these orders all came from visitors who left the website before making the purchase.
The abandoned cart reminders generated £1,804.99 of revenue for this webshop. How can you benefit from this? As we speak, people are on your webshop only to leave their shopping cart abandoned.
We’re happy to help you get them back to your webshop to make the sale!
