Nothing gives online marketers more shivers up their spines like “shopping cart abandonment”, where carts filled with products are abandoned because users never take the final step of putting in their credit cards and checking out.
The 3 most common reasons why people abandon their shopping carts:
- Overall price too expensive
- Unexpectedly high shipping cost
- Found a better price elsewhere
- Just browsing
- Process took too long
- Website crashed
If you are just starting out with the Basic plan, there are plenty of free & paid apps in the Shopify App Store to help you recover some revenue (type in “abandoned” in the search bar):
You will not be able to convince all your visitors to finalize the transaction. Not everyone had the intention to buy something, but you can bring back a good amount of shoppers if you follow-up with them and entice them to complete their transaction.
Here are two ways around it:
1) Recover Abandoned Carts with Personalized Emails
Email recovery campaigns are one of the most effective ways to recover lost customers after cart abandonment. Nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to purchases back on site.
But you can’t just send your customers generic emails. Your “comeback” email needs to be personalized (e.g. name, items in cart, discounts). It needs to be sent at the appropriate time. And, it should make the final checkout step fast and easy.
Personalized emails have a better chance of being opened. They improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Personalization tailors your message to what your customer thinks is relevant. Relevance is a huge part of customer experience.
Check out this Shopify blog post to get some ideas of how to personalize your emails.
2) Shopify Abandoned Cart Recovery Apps
Personalized emails are very effective when trying to get customers back on your site to complete their purchase. There are many abandoned cart recovery apps in Shopify’s Apps Store you can use.
AbandonApp is one of the most popular choices. The “AbandonApp” plug-in helps you recover lost revenue by reminding shoppers about their abandoned cart. The app makes it easy to see which customer abandoned their cart on your site and send them an automatic / manual email to drive them back to the site.
3) Retargeting Ads
Only about 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit, so what about the other 98%? You can send out personalized emails and use cart recovery apps, but there is another effective way to start recouping some of your revenue; retargeting ads.
Retargeting works by keeping track of users who’ve visited your store (and even placed items in their carts), so you can serve them highly targeted ads when they visit other sites (including Facebook).
Summing Up
Shopify is a great platform to start growing your ecommerce business and they provide tons of free resources to help you get started. Check out their Conversion Rate Optimization section on their blog to learn more about increasing your conversions and enticing your customers to complete their transactions.
Comments 1
Many thanks for your review of things, very interesting and useful article on e-commerce.