No one likes being stood up for a date, ghosted for a meeting, or left waiting for a return call. And if you sell things online, you probably hate it when someone is on the verge of ordering something and then bails on you. But as they say in dating, sometimes the problem is you – so let’s look at what you can do proactively to keep this from happening.
Understanding cart abandonment
The term “cart abandonment” is often used to formally describe what happens when a customer starts an order by putting something in their digital shopping cart, but does not complete the transaction. It happens more often than you think: according to a 2022 summary of cart abandonment statistics:
- Cart abandonment rates currently range from roughly 60-80% of online transactions.
- Some industries are particularly prone to cart abandonment, including travel (81.1%), financial products (80.4%), and retail (75.6%).
- Cart abandonment is big business – globally, it costs firms US $4.6 trillion, of which US $260 billion is potentially recoverable.
What you can do – and how we can help
Of course, some reasons for cart abandonment are out of your control, such as a customer getting cold feet about an expenditure. Other reasons require enterprise-level attention, such as high prices or too many negative customer reviews. But some solutions that are directly under your control include:
Make the checkout process as frictionless as possible. 27% of online shoppers cite a complicated checkout process as a reason for fleeing their cart – and by comparison, CSA notes that 77% of customers cite Amazon.com’s easy checkout process as a reason for using them.
A big part of this process involves designing the user interface of your checkout around a better customer experience, including having clear forms, making it easy for customers to apply discounts, and not requiring 40 pieces of data including their shoe size (unless, of course, they are buying shoes).
A key factor that towers over all of these is helping your customer zip through entering their contact data. Our DOTS Global Address Complete autocomplete capability populates complete addresses from the first keystroke and incorporates the industry’s leading CASS-certified USPS address validation, to ensure accurate data capture.
Make it easy to pay. There has been an explosion of “buy now, pay later” purchases over the past year, with over a 200% increase in BNPL purchases in 2021. Our DOTS Lead Validation product can give you the confidence to offer this to customers, guard against fraud, and reduce customer hesitancy at checkout.
Keep in touch. Follow-up emails and text messages to customers who abandon carts can be extremely effective. Klaviyo reports that even a single cart abandonment email is opened by nearly two-thirds of recipients and yields an average revenue per recipient of over $10, while SaleCycle notes that in 2021, SMS messages about this are opened 98% of the time with a clickthrough rate of 36%. Our email and phone validation products can ensure accurate follow-up, and also help guard against stiff federal compliance penalties for unwanted text messages.
Automating lower cart abandonment rates
There is one common denominator between all of these factors: proactive steps to reduce or mitigate cart abandonment have a very high ROI, and implementing automated contact data entry and validation solutions can help put much of this ROI on autopilot.
Service Objects solutions integrate with most major business automation platforms, using API interfaces, and all Service Objects products come with expert implementation assistance, available 24/7/365 technical support, and guaranteed 99.999% update. For a free consultation on your cart abandonment issues, including product demos and a free trial license, contact our knowledgeable product experts anytime.
