Are you desperately looking for ways to improve WooCommerce abandoned cart sales?
Over 60–80% of people who add items to their carts do not fully complete the purchase. For this reason, cart abandonment is one of the major concerns for every online store owner like you.
Every online store seems to experience this common problem almost every day. Yes, it’s true! The average WooCommerce store loses over 75% of its sales because of cart abandonment.
Today I’ll walk you through every possible thing that will help you improve cart abandonment for your WooCommerce store. Also, I’ll show you how to use the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment plugin, which can help you find customers who leave their shopping carts behind.
Lastly, I’ll share some strategies to prevent valuable users from leaving their shopping carts in your store. Before I begin, let’s quickly define “cart abandonment in WooCommerce.”
A quick navigation
WooCommerce abandoned cart explained
Cart abandonment is a metric that estimates how many people visit an eCommerce site, add items to their cart, and then leave without purchasing anything. It can also mean that customers put things in their carts but don’t check out for a long time, even if they don’t leave the site.
It’s frustrating for an online store owner to see how shoppers add products to the cart out of curiosity and eventually leave your site without buying them. On average, almost seven out of ten carts are abandoned per day across all online stores.
As a result, many eCommerce Brands Lose $18 Billion in Sales Revenue Each Year Because of Cart Abandonment
Dynamic Yield
After all, you have built your eCommerce store with a good online presence, done all the hard work, and invested a lot of money. All you have to do is encourage them to finish their purchase. Plus, know the real reasons why they don’t complete the checkout process.
Common reasons behind abandoned carts
People don’t complete their purchases in shopping carts for many different reasons. Some of the most common reasons are high shipping costs, a slow checkout process, requiring users to sign in or forcing them to make an account, etc.
Apart from that, there are still some other reasons why customers leave or abandon their shopping carts.
Let’s now reveal the most common reasons one by one:
Required account creation option
Creating an account takes extra time. Consumers may not want to open an account, especially if they just want to buy one thing. However, many online shops force customers to create accounts. So they can send abandoned cart emails to customers again and get more leads.
Generally, customers may not want to give their details during account creation if they have never purchased anything from the shop. Such as email address, credit card details, phone number, etc.
As a result, they leave the store’s checkout page without buying any products.
Complex or long checkout process
The best checkout flow is one that goes smoothly and quickly. The traditional checkout process goes like this: Shopping cart > billing information > shipping information > shipping method > order preview > payment > confirmation
Customers may not like this long checkout process. Instead, they are more likely to opt-in for an easy or short process to complete their purchase.
So if your online store still has a long checkout process, you’re probably missing out on a large number of customers. This is why almost 24% of customers leave their cart if they see the checkout process is too long or complex.
Unexpected or hidden costs
People don’t want to pay more than they see on the product page, especially when the product itself is expensive.
Let’s assume, you are selling washing machines online at $499 per unit. And you don’t reveal the shipping cost along with the product cost. So, after adding a washing machine to the cart, if a customer notices the price has increased to $520, the customer will most likely leave your online store.
According to a study from the Baymard Institute, more than 48% of people didn’t finish an order because they saw that the total cost was higher than the actual price.
Unavailability of the desired payment gateway method
The way people pay for things is evolving. In the past, most people used to purchase things with credit or debit cards. But now the scenario has changed. They prefer shopping with different payment methods, such as online wallets, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and dozens of other services.
“A recent study found that online retailers risk losing 42% of online shoppers if they don’t offer shoppers’ preferred payment methods.”
Poor UX or complex navigation
In some cases, visitors might not convert for more than one reason. Irresponsive UX design is one of them. For example, your shop page is great, and the layout design is world-class. But once users navigate through your website, they might find it difficult to navigate or find the things they are looking for.
Or, it might be hard for them to find the cart or figure out how to pay. As a result, they leave your website without making a purchase.
Let’s get a quick view of some important case studies about why customers abandon their carts:
A step-by-step guide to recovering abandoned carts in WooCommerce
An online store will always have some customers leave their carts. And this is obvious. At the same time, you can find some smart ways to win back those customers and turn them into loyal ones.
So after you know all the reasons why customers abandon their carts, it’s time to recover it. For that, I’ll use a plugin called the WooCommerce Cart Abandoned plugin.
Before I show the step-by-step process, I want to talk a bit about the plugin.
By using this plugin, you can do several things to improve cart abandonment on your WooCommerce store. For example, sending email notifications, showing GDRP notices, using ready templates while sending emails, and using webhooks like Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, and so on.
You might be wondering, “How does this amazing plugin handle the customers who have abandoned their carts?” Right?
What it does is collect the user’s email address from the checkout page. And then it starts sending follow-up emails to the users within 15 minutes if they don’t finish their checkout process.
By doing so, you can remind them to finish the purchase, ask for feedback, or offer a custom discount that will encourage them to finish the purchase. You are free to send as many emails as you want.
Getting curious? Now let’s look at how to install the plugin, change its settings, and set it up so that your WooCommerce store can recover carts that were left behind:
Let’s get started with the process:
Step one: install and activate the WooCommerce cart abandonment plugin
First, open your WordPress site. Then proceed to the plugin page. Select “Add New Plugin.” Type the plugin name in the search box: WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery.
Click on the “Install Now” button.
Once you’ve finished installing the plugin, now “Activate” it!
After you turn on the plugin, you can use the “WooCommerce” tab to find the “Cart Abandonment” option. Click on it to configure its options.
You’ll be heading to the overview page of the plugin.
Under this page, you’ll see the “Report” section. Here you’ll get a glimpse of the overall cart recovery data for your store. You can view data on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis.
Plus, there is a “Custom filter” option available on the top right corner of the page. By using it, you can see the recovery data for a date range. Last but not least, you can search for your preferred orders through email.
Apart from that, there are several things that you should know about.
Let’s see them one by one:
- Recoverable Orders: How many orders can be recovered
- Recovered Orders: Number of recovered orders
- Lost Orders: Number of lost orders from the recoverable orders
- Recoverable Revenue: Total estimated revenue could be generated from the recoverable orders
- Recovered Revenue: Total revenue generated from the recovered orders
- Recovery Rate: The final recovery rate or abandoned cart rate
Step two: schedule follow-up emails
The next step is to set up follow-up emails. To do that, click on the “Follow-Up Emails” button. You’ll be heading to the dashboard for the follow-up emails. Here you can see a list of premade follow-up emails.
To create a new email template, click on the “Create New Template” button.
Here you’ll get all the essential elements that will help you send follow-up emails to your users.
Now you need to do some important tasks here.
- First, activate the template
- Give a template name
- Give an email subject line
- Write your email
- If you want to use WooCommerce’s default template design, check the WooCommerce email style box
- If you want to send a coupon for this template, check the “Create Coupon” box
- Type the time to schedule the email sending time (day, hour, minute)
- And lastly, you can check on to email by sending a test email
Another thing is that once you mark the “Create Coupon” option, you’ll get some options to customize the coupon.
From here, you can select the discount type, amount of the coupon, and expiration date.
Also, you can set up free shipping, allow each user to use it, and have coupons automatically applied if the user buys the products.
Once you’re done, save the updates and move on to the next step.
Step three: configure general settings
Now click on “Settings.” You’ll get all the details about your cart abandonment-related settings here.
Let’s look at them one by one. First, you’ll have to configure the “Cart Abandonment Settings.”
- Enable the email tracking option to track the email details of your users
- Set the cut-off time to measure the cart abandonment after a user refuses to make a purchase
- You can individually set the tracking permission for different roles. Such as admin, editor, author, subscriber, or anyone else that you don’t want to track their cart abandonment records
- Depending on the order status, you can set the tracking. You can disable tracking when the order is in processing or completed, for example
- By checking the “Notify recovery to admin” box, which will send a recovery order email to admin.
- Lastly, you can add your preferred UTM parameter line on the checkout page to track the activity that will be happening on this URL
Slightly scroll down, and you’ll find the “Coupon Settings.”
Here, you can delete the coupon every week. Or you can do the task manually after your purposes are met.
The email settings will come next. Here, set your “From” name, “From” address, and “Reply To” address.
Under “Email Settings,” you’ll get the “Recovery Report Emails” option. To get all recovery cart reports, just turn on the option and enter your preferred email address.
We’re at the very last portion of the settings.
You’ll get three options:
- Webhook: If you turn on the webhook setting, it’s easy to connect your marketing automation tool to your cart abandonment system. To do this, you need to insert the Webhook URL
- GDRP: To show a notice on the checkout page, enable this option. It goes like this – Your email and cart are saved. It will give a reminder about the order
- Plugin Settings: By enabling the option, all data related to the plugin will be deleted once you delete the plugin
After configuring all the settings, just hit the save button. That’s it!
With the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin on your WordPress site, you can now track and analyze the data from abandoned shopping carts to make more sales and money.
However, to get a better view and understanding of the plugin settings, you can check out the video right away:
Cart Abandonment Recovery For WooCommerce From CartFlows
Some additional ways to recover your WooCommerce store’s cart abandonment
As of now, you have learned what cart abandonment is, what the vital reasons are, and how to use a tool to recover it.
However, a tool may not provide you with all of the solutions you expect. For example, you need to use some tricks or “proven growth hacks” to get people to leave their shopping carts.
Just remember one thing: even the best-optimized checkout process has an abandonment rate of 20 percent
Plan your strategy and learn from your mistakes while keeping the percentage in mind. Plus, align your current plans with the strategies that I’ll be covering below.
Let’s get started:
Make the checkout process as simple as possible
The more simple your checkout page is, the better users will feel satisfied while finishing the checkout process. Keeping it complicated may discourage users from completing the checkout process.
“According to the Baymard Institute, checkout optimization can increase conversions by 35.62 percent.”
So if your checkout workflow is still long and confusing, please consider changing its UX or steps.
Add a progress arrow to the checkout page
Progress bars are a great user interface tool because they show users how many steps are left in a user flow. This gives a sense of forward movement and shows visually how many steps are left to finish the purchase. Also, it will show how much time they’ve spent at the checkout.
For example, if a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn’t start the checkout process, you can set up a pop-up to remind them that they haven’t finished the purchase or that they have one or two steps left.
Maintain a guest checkout method
A customer can buy things without having to sign up for an account or log in for guest checkout. This way, the store will not retain the user’s data during the checkout process.
Many online stores want customers to sign up for an account so that they can check out faster in the future. But many customers don’t want to sign up for a new account just to buy something.
By turning on the “guest checkout” feature in WooCommerce, you can let people buy products without having to sign up. At the same time, don’t forget to optimize your checkout page with a simple and easy design for a better result.
Be transparent about the overall costs
For sites in the US, shipping costs can vary based on where you live, which makes it harder for shoppers to understand.
There are some options, though, like putting a shipping calculator on each product page where shoppers can enter their zip code to see how much shipping will cost. In this manner, you seem very clear and transparent about the overall cost.
More than 55% of shoppers abandon their carts only because of the extra costs. Baymard Institute
Hence, customers will understand the overall cost they will incur. Showing customers the hidden cost on the checkout page can make them more likely to move on to the next step.
Provide support where it’s required
When a customer has a problem or a question, they want a quick answer. Live chat support lets them get quick answers to their questions, which can ease any technical issues that might keep them from buying.
Keep in mind that live chat means you have to respond quickly, so don’t offer it if you can’t do it. Data shows that a chat tool’s first response time must be less than one minute. During off-hours, you can have a chatbot take over, but customers should be able to ask for help from a real person if their problem isn’t solved.
Provide preferred payment methods during the checkout process
When making a purchase, customers prefer to use the payment method of their choice. This saves them a lot of time and keeps them from having to repeat their billing information. So, figure out how your customers prefer to pay so you can provide them with the best integrations possible.
Common queries regarding the abandoned WooCommerce cart
You may still have some questions roaming around in your mind. I have sorted out some common queries regarding the WooCommerce Cart Abandoned. I believe hope that it will help you to remove all the pending confusion about it.
Let’s see them one by one:
01. What is a reasonable abandoned cart conversion rate?
If your abandoned cart recovery rate is above 10%, you are doing a decent job.
02. What is the abandonment rate in Google Analytics??
In Google Analytics, the abandonment rate calculates the percentage of people who started but did not finish a conversion process.
03. How is the Abandoned cart rate calculated?
To figure out the shopping cart abandonment rate, divide the number of completed transactions by the number of sales that were started. Then subtract the number from one and multiply it by 100 to get your abandonment rate.
Let’s say that in the last month, 6,000 people bought things from your online store. 35,000 shopping carts were started but didn’t end up being bought. By taking one away from the result of dividing the two numbers, you can see that 80% of shoppers didn’t finish their transactions this month.
*(1 – (6,000 ÷ 35,000)) * 100 = 82%
So your abandoned cart rate is 82%. That means 82% of customers didn’t complete their checkout process!
04. How effective are abandoned cart emails?
Abandoned cart emails are sent to shoppers who leave the items in their carts without making any purchases. Research on 500 of the world’s best-known brands shows that 44.1% of abandoned cart emails are read. Almost a third of the clicks on emails about abandoned carts (29.5%) lead to a sale.
Final thoughts on WooCommerce cart abandonment
Whether your shop looks great or is well-designed, you’ll still face the cart abandonment issue. It’s a major issue in the world of eCommerce. But at the same time, applying some tricks and strategies can help you keep it as low as possible.
On the flip side, you can always A/B test your approach to finding out why customers are leaving your online store.
In that case, ask yourself these questions:
- Does adding more shipping methods is the reason for the low abandonment rate?
- Is my UX not well-furnished?
- Does my store have many unwanted options?
- Is the store’s checkout process too long?
Investigate the root causes of client churn and put solutions in place as soon as possible. Of course, follow the strategies I shared above and use the WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery plugin to get the ultimate result.
