E-Commerce Cart Abandonment | Exploring Consumer Behaviour

In my last blog, I am going to look at e-commerce cart abandonment which is something we implemented at Protyre to help bring back users that left the website without purchasing. The significance of a good cart abandonment programme is very important and a great way to increase your websites conversion rates.  

Any product that enters the shopping cart but never makes it through the transaction is considered to be abandoned by the shopper.

Consumer behaviour and the reasons for E-commerce cart abandonment:

1. Unexpected shipping costs
2. Having to create a new user account
3. Conducting research to buy later
4. Concerns about payment security
5. Website had errors/crashes
6. Payment was declined

The shopping cart abandonment rate is an important metric for e-commerce sites to keep track, because a high abandonment rate could signal a poor user experience or broken sales funnel. Reducing shopping cart abandonment leads directly to more sales and revenue, so optimising the checkout flow is a key one at Protyre. In a Statista Article from December 2021 looking at the shopping cart abandonment rate worldwide in 2021 it was suggested automotive had the highest abandonment rates out of all measured with an 89.11% abandonment rate (Statista, 2021) – this is the sector Protyre fits into so is very relevant to help benchmark our performance.

Protyre has a shopping cart abandonment rate of approximately 72% this is significantly below the industry average which is great to see. We have worked very hard to improve our user experience and this cart abandonment rate has dropped over the last few years with the improvements made in our checkout process, product pages and search results all helping to improve our conversion rates on the website. The key to a successful cart abandonment strategy is to increase the identification rate of your users, should a user abandon it is important to collect their email address so you can retarget them in your cart abandonment programme. Protyre has a cart abandonment identification rate of approximately 30% – increasing this number will help to identify many more potential users you can target and recover revenue from. We use lightboxes across the website to capture our users email addresses so we can target them.

I built the strategy behind the Protyre cart abandonment programme a number of years ago and we have used this very successfully in partnership with the software provider Pure360 who built the technology for this solution, which recovers over £600k per annum via the Protyre ecommerce website. We target our customers that have abandoned and been identified with a programme of three emails.

1. Email 1 – sent 15 mins after the user abandons the website.
2. Email 2 – sent 24 hours after the user abandoned the website (consumers are creatures of habit and shop online at the same times)
3. Email 3 – Final email sent 3 days after the user first abandoned the website (with a promotional offer).

*If the customer returns to the Protyre website and purchases in between receiving any of these cart abandonment emails we will not send out the further email. We know from analysis completed that the majority of customers that return to purchase will do this after receiving Email 1 and within the first 24 hours of abandoning.

Conclusion

In today’s eCommerce industry, shopping cart and checkout abandonment are all too common consumer behaviours among online shoppers. As a result of this it is very important any retailer makes abandonment reduction a primary goal in any digital marketing strategy. I cant recommend a good cart abandonment programme enough to help improve your websites performance.  

Thanks for reading! I hope you have found my own experiences interesting and how I have related these subjects to my job role. Please leave a comment, I would love to get your thoughts.

Bibliography:

SaleCycle. (March 24, 2021). Online shopping cart abandonment rate in selected industries in March 2021 [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/457078/category-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/ (Accessed: 13^th February 2022).

https://www.pure360.com/cart-abandonment-recovery/ (Accessed: 13^th February 2022).