Shopping cart abandonment: what is it and how to improve it?

Every click, scroll, and tap on your website leads your customers closer to checkout—or causes them to hesitate. Shopping cart abandonment isn’t just a frustrating reality of ecommerce; it’s a golden opportunity to understand what’s standing between your customers and their purchase.

Whether it’s fixing friction in your checkout flow, building trust with your audience, or crafting a seamless user experience (UX), we’ll show you how to turn abandoned carts into completed purchases.

In this article, we cover:

• What is cart abandonment rate and how to calculate it?

• Why cart abandonment matters

• 4 reasons customers abandon their shopping carts

• 6 ways to improve cart abandonment rate

• Other metrics to track to understand cart abandonment

What is cart abandonment rate?

Cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts an online checkout process for an order but drops out before finishing the purchase. Abandonment rate is a direct reflection of the customer journey.

Think of cart abandonment rate as a ‘missed opportunity rate'. It’s like when someone picks up a product in a physical store, decides it’s not worth it, sets it back on the shelf, and leaves.

The good news: knowing where you stand with your current abandonment rate helps your product team move toward better alignment with your customer (and their evolving expectations) and your product (and its potential value).

Cart abandonment vs. checkout abandonment

Cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are two different situations, not to be confused or seen as interchangeable.

• Cart abandonment means a customer has abandoned their purchase at any stage in the journey leading up to the checkout stage

• Checkout abandonment means the customer has left the process after entering their information in the checkout stage of the process

How to calculate cart abandonment rate

Calculate the shopping cart abandonment rate by dividing the total number of successfully completed purchases by the number of shopping carts created.

The formula looks like this:

[#] completed purchases / [#] shopping carts created * 100 = [%] cart abandonment rate

Why is cart abandonment important?

A high cart abandonment rate can cause problems for ecommerce businesses because, simply put, it represents potential customers who chose not to become customers. Abandoned carts are lost sales—and lost sales equals lost revenue.

But abandoned carts can also be a symptom of a bigger issue. A high abandoned cart rate may indicate there’s something wrong with:

• Your product

• The perception of your brand

• The customer experience you’re providing

• The user experience of your site or app

• How you stack up against competitors

• Your ecommerce conversion funnel

Whatever the cause, if left unexamined—and untreated—the issues behind abandoned carts can compound, leading to lower profits, more budget spent trying to regain customers’ attention with retargeting, and frustrated customers who may turn to competitors.

Why do customers abandon their shopping carts?

Before diving into solutions, it’s important to understand why potential customers abandon their carts. Let’s look at 4 common reasons:

1. Lack of trust: a poorly designed website can deter customers. Build confidence by ensuring the site is mobile-friendly and visually appealing, showcasing products with high-quality images and using clear, on-brand copy.

2. Payment options aren’t easy to see (or use): your customers are usually shopping around for the best deals. A complicated checkout process means users will have to spend time filling in all the fields.

3. Confusing navigation: the best website experiences help customers feel in control, so it’s important that the checkout process feels simple, focused, and informative.

4. Lack of localization: your customers can exist in different cultural contexts, so you need to be aware of a message or image’s original intent, style, tone, and context when switching between cultures. 

👉 Curious about what drives customers to leave their carts behind? Check out our chapter on why customers abandon their shopping carts

6 ways to improve cart abandonment rate

Here’s how to build a solid relationship with your customers when they're still undecided about your brand with the help of Contentsquare 👋:

1. Build trust with visual and text-based social proof

Think of your website and checkout flow like a two-way conversation: you shouldn’t just be talking about how great you are—include evidence that other people think so, too!

Often called ‘social proof’, a visual or text-based endorsement from an industry or individual can help customers feel safe when shopping with you. Examples that you’re a trusted brand can include:

• A ‘verified’ badge on your social media profiles

• A ‘secure payment’ trust badge that’s highly visible during the checkout process

• Customer testimonials that highlight how people derived value from your product

• Validated security certificates during each step of the payment process

Heatmaps can help you improve your social proof by

• Showing if important content is being ignored on certain pages

• Showing when users ignore a video

• Showing where (and when) users move their mouse on a webpage

Contentsquare lets you create different types of maps to discover where users click, move or scroll

2. Include a guest checkout option to speed up the checkout process

When your customer is motivated to buy your product or service, it's in your best interest that it be easy for them to buy. Your product team can use session replays to look for issues and blockers that slow down (or break) the checkout process, like

• Broken page links

• Slow page loading times

• Poor or confusing navigation

• Cross-browser compatibility issues

• Cross-device compatibility issues

Session replay tools (like Contentsquare 👋) also let you see how users behave on your site in the moments before they abandon their cart, which helps you identify patterns and behaviors (like rage clicks or u-turns) that indicate a poor customer experience.

For example, if creating a user account isn't a requirement, new customers may want to skip that step of the checkout process—session replays can show you how often customers are using a guest checkout option to make their purchase.

On the other hand, if creating a user account is a requirement, session replays can show you whether customers are creating an account or exiting the page when they get to the account-creation part of the checkout process—in which case you might consider adding a guest checkout option as a time-sensitive way to guide them to a final purchase decision.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool in action

3. A/B test changes to your website

In-depth analysis of user behavior is more than just number crunching—it’s also about understanding how users experience and interact with your website, and running experiments to learn more.

In an A/B test, half of the users landing on your website will see the original (or 'control') version A. The other half will see a 'variation' version B that features a change or group of changes, such as a different header, images, call to action (CTA), page structure, etc.

To reduce cart abandonment rate, your product team can use a tool like Contentsquare Heatmaps when A/B testing to experiment with:

• Different value propositions

• A variety of special offers

• The number of allocated steps in the checkout process

• Variations of CTA buttons

Use Contentsquare’s Heatmaps tool to gauge how users respond to changes you make when A/B testing

4. Be transparent about your costs and return policy

If they’re not able to see the full product price—including shipping and other fees—before checkout, shoppers are likely to not go through with their purchase. This shows why it’s so important to be transparent with extra costs. 

• Provide your customers with the exact total, including shipping and taxes, directly in the cart, so they know exactly what they’ll pay. 

• Highlight your return policy. Shoppers want to know they have options for items they buy online. If they feel that it's a risk-free or low-risk buy, they’ll be more motivated to complete their purchase.Furthermore, up to 66% of shoppers say they would spend more with a generous return policy.

• Offer a free 30-day return policy for a few months. Remember to keep tracking the number of returns and compare this to the added shipping costs to see if this is a profitable strategy.

5. Optimize your cart abandonment emails

Cart recovery emails are another way to improve abandonment rates. This type of email marketing collects product information data—including a list of items in the customer’s cart—and delivers a reminder for the user to complete the purchase.

Setting up an automated cart abandonment email is a great way to lower your cart abandonment rates. Here are 2 ways to optimize this process:

• Personalize your cart abandonment emails: people tend to trust brands or products more easily if they can connect with them on a more personal level. Try using the shopper’s name in the subject line and email copy, and use information like birthdays, location, and even when you send the email to improve personalization. 

• Use compelling subject lines: a short and straightforward subject line can help improve your cart abandonment email open rate. Here are a few examples:

• Your cart is waiting

• Finish your purchase

• Still shopping?

• You left items in your cart

• 15% off your cart

• Reminder: there are items in your cart

• Forget something?

• What's that in your cart?

A reminder of the product they’ve left in the cart—along with extra incentives—can be enough to convince a shopper to continue with their purchase. 

6. Retarget cart abandoners with relevant ads

Another option that leverages customer information to recover a lost sale from cart abandonment is retargeting ads. These ads target your cart abandoners everywhere else online, and reach out and lead customers back to your site to finalize their purchases.

According to research from Shopify, retargeted ads can bring up to 26% of otherwise-lost customers back to your website. Here are a few tips to get you started with retargeting:

• Retargeting can lift ad engagement rates significantly, so be bold. Use advertising slots on social media, email, and other websites.

• Google Display Network and Facebook have massive reach and are ideal platforms for retargeting cart abandoners. The Google Display Network reaches around 90% of all internet users, while, according to Backlinko, Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users.

• Use dynamic product ads to show customers the exact items they’ve left in the cart, and nudge them to head back to your website to complete the purchase.

• Shoppers who spend more time engaging with your business on Facebook are more likely to purchase. Make sure to include this when filtering your retargeting audiences.

What other metrics should you be tracking (besides cart abandonment rate)?

To find out what’s motivating a customer to abandon their shopping cart or the checkout process, you can dig a little deeper using these key metrics to connect the dots:

• Abandoned order value: knowing your abandoned order value (AOV) can tell you what you stand to gain by reducing your cart abandonment rate

• Website load times: the faster your checkout process is, the more likely a customer will make a purchase—plus, they'll have an easier time entering their payment information.

• Device usage: by knowing your customer’s preferred device, your product team can track issues across different devices or identify issues with checkout on a specific device.

Stop missing out on sales

Cart abandonment recovery is an art you can master over time by investing in tools (like Contentsquare👋) that help you understand what your customer says and does over time and why.

Be diligent about addressing customer issues as they come up: use heatmaps, session replays, and regular customer feedback to improve your content, make design tweaks, and simplify your website navigation.

Invest attention and effort into understanding user behavior, and you’ll not only realize who you’re serving behind every click but also uphold the value that what’s right for your customer is often what’s best for business.