Digital shopping cart abandonment

Sara Heegaard March 3, 20222 minute read

Sara is a copywriter focused on lifting up Recharge's merchants, partners, and their customers. Before Recharge, her past lives included writing and editing at four different subscription... Full bio

What is digital shopping cart abandonment?

Digital shopping cart abandonment is when a prospective customer visits an ecommerce store, begins the shopping process, and adds items to their online cart, but does not complete the purchase. Most cart abandonment indicates a confusing checkout process, and can be caused by a variety of related issues, including unexpected shipping costs, an unclear return policy, and requiring shoppers to create an account to complete their order.

Reducing cart abandonment rate

Shopping cart abandonment rate can be calculated by dividing an online retailer’s total amount of completed transactions by its total number of created digital shopping carts. Monitoring ecommerce cart abandonment for your store, and conducting A/B testing to identify the reasons your shoppers abandon their carts, can provide key insights into issues with your sales funnel and/or checkout flow. Depending on the nature of the issue, improving the user experience via solutions like offering a guest checkout option, providing promo codes, optimizing online shopping for mobile phones, and offering free shipping or clarity around shipping pricing and returns policies can help reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversion rates.

Abandoned cart recovery emails 

In addition to using strategies to reduce cart abandonment, online retailers can also attempt to recover abandoned carts. Cart abandonment emails are one key way marketers can improve their checkout completion rates. Here, the retailer can send a customized email with a direct link to the customer’s cart and checkout pages so they can complete the purchase as they left it. At this stage, ecommerce businesses can also provide further incentives, such as free shipping or deals on specific items in their carts, to encourage customers to complete their purchase. These abandoned cart recovery emails are another strategy ecommerce retailers can use to improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.