What is shopping cart abandonment?

In e-commerce, shopping cart abandonment refers to instances when site visitors add products to their virtual cart or bag but leave the site before completing their purchase. It’s the online equivalent of ditching a shopping cart in the middle of an aisle and walking out of a store. Common reasons for online cart abandonment include complicated checkout processes, slow website load times, needing to do more research on the product, or not wanting to share credit card information with an unfamiliar site.

Cart abandonment can cost e-commerce brands thousands of dollars each year, not to mention lower conversion rates, so it’s in your company’s best interest to uncover user experience problems causing abandonment and take proactive steps to solve those problems. Don’t believe us? We’ll let the cart abandonment stats below speak for themselves!

4 eye-opening shopping cart abandonment stats

1: $4 trillion worth of merchandise is abandoned by shoppers annually.

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How much revenue is your company losing out on?

2: Abandonment increases by 7% for every second your site takes to load.

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If your customers look like that while they’re waiting for your site to load, how long do you think they’re going to stick around?

3: 26% of online shoppers in the US have abandoned a shopping cart because of a complicated checkout process.

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We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

4: As little as 8.5% of mobile shoppers complete the online checkout process.

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Seems like more people should be completing their purchases, right?

With cart abandonment stats like these, what’s a brand to do?

There are several approaches to solving shopping cart abandonment problems. E-commerce resources and guides suggest everything from automated follow-up emails to free shipping codes to guest check out, but if your business isn’t currently in a position to offer these items, there’s an easier option.

An AI-enabled conversational commerce solution, such as Joinedapp, allows you to empower a digital consultant for your brand who can interact with shoppers, answer their questions, and process their payments all within one environment, like a messaging app. This means that shoppers are less likely to abandon their carts due to redirects to sluggish mobile websites that don't have the look and feel of the environment they started shopping in. You can avoid slow checkout page load times by connecting your digital consultant to messaging apps. These platforms are quick and media content appears instantly instead of gradually. User experience is highly enhanced with super smooth touch gesture controls, as well as text and hands-free voice commands, making it so easy to complete a purchase that abandonment is much less likely. A native environment also supports push notification signaling so you can follow-up with a mobile shopper should they not complete the checkout process. These are all key features that Joinedapp offers to strengthen existing offerings and reduce cart abandonment.

In today’s phone-centric world, having a mobile-friendly website goes beyond looking good on a small screen. True mobile optimization means adapting your site to fit into your customer’s lifestyle and personalizing the shopping experience to their individual needs. If they need help on the go, you have to be able to provide at any time of day. If they only have a few minutes to spare between work meetings or errands to buy a gift for a loved one, you have to make the checkout process as smooth as possible. Make your customers happy, decrease shopping cart abandonment, and increase mobile conversions: get in touch with us today.