Why do your customers abandon their online shopping carts? (And what can you do to reduce it)

Discover the benefits of writing an effective abandoned cart email sequence

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One of the most comfortable ways of shopping these days (for anything, really) is online shopping. Everything is just one click away — all you have to do is enable the one-click purchase option, if available, and the products you added to your shopping cart will be right at your doorstep in no time. Easily adding your products to the cart, quick buy option, intuitive editing of the shopping cart and the possibility to save your cart for later are just a few aspects that make online shopping our first option for many needs in our lives. However, even with all the benefits of an intuitive and quick online buying process, purchases are not always completed. The shopping cart is often abandoned and the purchasing cycle is interrupted. In this article, I will take a closer look at shopping cart abandonment, the reasons behind it, and what you can actively do as an ecommerce business to reduce cart abandonment. Let’s bring back your potential customers!

What is shopping cart abandonment?

We talk about shopping cart abandonment when an online shopper starts the checkout process of an order but doesn’t go all through the checkout steps. The order is abandoned at some point in the checkout process and the shopping cart itself and the products in the order are considered abandoned. There are many reasons why this can happen and I will go through them below but for now, let’s just take a look at why shopping cart abandonment is such an important metric for online shops and how can you calculate it. And while we’re at it, taking a look at some stats will definitely help. So, let’s jump to the good stuff.

Shopping cart abandonment is definitely a metric that gets a lot of attention from ecommerce shops and this is why: simply put, businesses lose money. Every abandoned shopping cart is a lost increase in revenue. This is happening all over the world with all online businesses. Let’s take a look at what SaleCycle reveals in their 2021 Ecommerce Stats Trends Report about shopping cart abandonment per region: