If you run an online store, the same thing happens every single day: people come to your site, pick a product, put it in the cart and then leave. They don’t leave because they don’t want the product. They leave because something between the cart and the “Pay” button confused them, worried them or simply bored them.
From the day I launched MarketOnline in 2005 to my work today at Retargeting, the abandoned cart is the problem I keep coming back to. Most industry studies put the abandonment rate at around two thirds of all carts, sometimes more. The exact figure varies from study to study, but the point stands: most people who add something to their cart never finish the order. With Black Friday and the holiday season around the corner, now is the best time to take a hard look at it.
Why people walk away from their carts
Some abandonment is normal: some people are comparing prices, others are just browsing. But a big share of abandonment is caused directly by the store, and the reasons are the same from one site to the next:
- Surprise shipping costs. The shopper sees one price on the product page and a higher one at the end. It comes first in almost every survey and it is the easiest one to avoid.
- Forced account creation. The customer wants to buy a pair of shoes, not start a relationship with you. Ask for a password before payment and some of them will leave.
- Long forms. Every extra field is one more reason to give up. Do you really need a date of birth to ship a phone?
- Slow or clumsy mobile checkout. More and more traffic comes from phones, yet many stores still have a checkout designed for desktop: tiny buttons, fields that don’t fit, pages that crawl on 3G.
- Missing payment options. In Romania, cash on delivery is still hugely popular, but more people now want to pay by card or PayPal. If you don’t offer the option the customer wants, they will find it at a competitor.
- Lack of trust. A site that looks sloppy, with no clear contact details, no returns policy and no sign that payment is secure, makes people hesitate exactly when they need to take out their card.
Fix the checkout first, then recover
A mistake I see often: a store builds a sophisticated abandoned-cart email system while the checkout stays just as bad. It is like posting someone at the door to call customers back into a shop with a half-hour queue at the till. Recovery matters, but the cheapest recovered cart is the one that was never abandoned.
A few things you can do in a matter of weeks:
- Show shipping costs as early as possible, ideally on the product page. If you can, offer free shipping above a certain threshold and tell people clearly how much they still need to add to get it.
- Let customers check out as guests. You can offer to create an account after payment, with one click, from the details they have already entered.
- Cut form fields ruthlessly. Name, phone, email, address. The rest is usually the marketing department’s curiosity.
- Test your checkout on your own phone, on mobile data, not on the office Wi-Fi. If it annoys you, it annoys your customers.
- Offer at least two or three payment methods: card, cash on delivery and, if you also sell abroad, PayPal.
- Display your company details, a phone number that someone actually answers, your returns policy and your payment processor’s logos.
Abandoned-cart emails: when to send them and what to say
Once the checkout is in good shape comes part two: bringing back the people who left anyway. Email is still the most effective tool, provided you have the customer’s address. That is why you should ask for the email as early as possible in checkout, as the first field, not the last.
A simple sequence that works for most stores looks something like this:
- First email, one to two hours after abandonment. A plain reminder: “You left something in your cart.” With the product photo, the price and a big button that takes them straight back to the cart, not to the homepage.
- Second email, the next day. Answer objections: shipping, returns, warranty, reviews from other customers. Many people did not leave because of the price but because of a doubt.
- Third email, two or three days later. Only now, and only if your margins allow it, offer a small incentive: free shipping or a modest discount with an expiry date.
Be careful with discounts. Send a 10% coupon in the first email and you teach customers that abandoning the cart pays off every time. Use incentives as a last resort, not a reflex, and test whether they bring in extra money or just shave your margin on orders you would have received anyway.
Retargeting ads and on-site reminders
Not everyone who abandons a cart leaves you an email address. For them there are retargeting ads, on Facebook and on the Google Display Network. Dynamic ads that show people the exact product they left in the cart usually work much better than a generic banner with your store’s logo.
The common-sense rule is not to overdo it. If someone sees the same pair of shoes for a month, everywhere they go online, they stop thinking about buying them and start thinking you are stalking them. Cap the frequency, stop the ad once the person has bought, and set a sensible window, from a few days to two weeks, depending on how long people take to decide on your products.
The third channel is your own website. When the customer comes back, the cart should be waiting exactly as they left it. A discreet “You still have items in your cart” message, or a window shown when someone is about to close the page, can save some of those orders, as long as you don’t bombard them with pop-ups on every click.
What I learned building Retargeting
I co-founded Retargeting precisely because I saw how much money online stores leave on the table over things that can be automated: the email sent at the right moment, the ad with the right product, the personalised message on the site. What I have noticed, in general, is that technology matters less than discipline. The stores that get results are the ones that check their numbers every week, test one thing at a time and never settle for “it works, leave it”.
Say you run a sporting goods store and you recover just one in ten abandoned orders. It sounds small. But if a few hundred people abandon their carts every month, that is dozens of extra orders, from customers who already knew you and wanted the product. You rarely find cheaper money in e-commerce.
A quick checklist
- Is the shipping cost visible before checkout?
- Can people order without an account?
- Does the form ask only for what is strictly necessary?
- Does checkout work well on an ordinary phone, on mobile data?
- Do you offer at least two or three payment methods, including the one your customers prefer?
- Are your company details, phone number and returns policy easy to find?
- Do you ask for the customer’s email at the start of checkout?
- Do you have a sequence of two or three recovery emails with a direct link to the cart?
- Do discounts appear only at the end, and only when they make sense?
- Do your retargeting ads have a frequency cap and exclude people who already bought?
- Is the cart saved when the customer comes back?
- Do you track your abandonment rate and recovered carts every month?
An abandoned cart is not the customer’s failure, it is a signal for you. It shows you exactly where the path to the order breaks. What have you changed in your checkout, and what difference did it make? I would love to hear about it in the comments.