Shopping cart abandonment: Top 10 reasons behind it and the best solutions to fix it (Part 1)

If you look at your website’s statistics, you most likely will find a number of customers who changed their minds and quit your page without sending their orders. Shopping cart abandonment is a real dealbreaker when it comes to the success of a business. But why does it happen so often? Why do shoppers abandon their carts at the last minute?

Undoubtedly, this is one of the most frustrating things you experience while running an online business. It takes effort to make customers visit your website and it requires a good design, content, and marketing strategy to lead them through your pages. Yet when they finally look like taking action, something happens and they abandon their cart.  

In today’s article, we are going after the reasons why customers choose to abandon their carts. We are going to discuss the 10 most popular reasons behind this tendency and give you some solutions that might help you to fix the issue. 

#1 The lack of a guest check-out option

From a marketing point of view, it makes total sense to require your shoppers to create an account before they finalize their purchase. However, this takes effort on the part of the customers and chances are, they won’t appreciate it. Some customers, especially those that came across your website might not want to create a permanent account. Instead, they see this order as a one-time thing. Therefore, if you block them from taking quick action and require them to spend more time creating an account, they will leave your website. 

Solution: Make guest check-out available and allow your visitors to purchase your products without having to create a permanent account.

#2 Unexpected shipping and delivery fees

Shipping costs usually appear once the customer enters their shipping address. At this point, the customer can revalue the purchase, and add or remove items if necessary. The problem starts when unexpected shipping costs appear in the cart at checkout. If this happens, it’s not surprising that customers choose to change their minds and abandon the cart. 

Solution: Be clear and concise about shipping costs. Avoid adding high shipping fees at the end of the checkout process.

#3 Complicated checkout process

The customer arrived at your website, got familiar with the product or services you offer, and decided to make a purchase. The next step is to lead your shopper to the checkout page as fast and as simply as possible. However, some businesses tend to overcomplicate the checkout process by expecting the customer to take too much effort in order to be able to send the order. A good example is requiring the customer to fill a long list with their personal details and create a permanent account. A long and confusing checkout process can easily result in a failed purchase, as the customer will abandon the cart in a second if the checkout process takes too long. 

Solution: Go through the checkout process and try to detect all extra and unnecessary steps that could ruin the customer experience. Remove these steps and details from your checkout process. 

#4 Slow website and poor website performance

If your website is slow and it takes a lot of time for your pages to load, you have all chances to lose the customer before they put anything in their cart or make it to the checkout page. Poor site performance is a dealbreaker. You cannot expect your customer to have the patience to wait until your product page is loading or come back to the website after a crash or a frustrating error. 

Solution: Monitor the performance and speed of your website regularly to see if any issues might block your customers from finalizing their purchases. Tools like GTmetrix or Google Analytics can help you find out if there’s anything wrong with the performance of your website. 

#5 No customer support

No matter how experienced an internet user is, they still might be looking for strong customer support that is reliable and easy to reach. If your website lacks this, you might have a problem that needs fixing. No customer support is a common reason for shopping cart abandonment, as people like to have support available during their shopping sessions. 

Solution: Accompany your customers during their session by adding some sort of customer support system they can rely on if needed. 

Closing thoughts

The lack of a guest check-out option, unexpected shipping, and delivery fees, a complicated checkout process, poor website performance or the lack of reliable customer support can all cause shopping cart abandonment. Luckily, these issues are easy to fix. All you need to do is to analyze the customer experience and understand what it is like to navigate your website and be on the checkout page of your website. 

We hope that in the first part of our article, we could share some useful tips with you to fix the issues that keep your customers from abandoning their carts. Check back soon for the second part of the article, where we will continue our list by giving 5 more common reasons why people choose to quit your website without confirming their order! See you there!