April 06, 2018
reducing-abandoned-carts-on-your-woocommerce-store

Last year, the Baymard Institute published a fascinating list of eCommerce cart abandonment rates. The average rate of cart abandonment reported by the study is just shy of 70%. According to Statista, abandonment rates in the second quarter of 2017 were 77.3% averaged across eCommerce sectors. Most reports on the subject report cart abandonment rates somewhere between 65% and 80% depending on the sector and the time of year.

Of course, many of those abandoned carts were only abandoned in a technical sense. Shoppers have lots of reasons for putting items in their shopping cart: window shopping, price comparison, or as a reminder. They may never have intended to make a purchase. But that leaves some proportion of shoppers who had planned to make a purchase but changed their mind, a proportion that could make a significant difference to the bottom lines of WooCommerce hosting clients.

Some abandoned carts are intractable, but many are not. There are several methods, both pre- and post-abandonment, that WooCommerce users can employ to reduce cart abandonment.

Slow eCommerce kills conversions

In spite of the widely acknowledged importance of performance to eCommerce conversion rates, I still come across stores of all sizes that are woefully slow.

The first step in reducing cart abandonment rates is to provide a positive shopping experience. Unoptimized WooCommerce hosting is often the culprit, and migrating to a hosting provider that can offer the resources required by a fast WooCommerce store should be a priority.

Once the hosting is taken care of, look into caching solutions like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket, which can give a significant boost on some pages.

Embrace No Hassle Checkouts

Complex and time-consuming checkout processes are a leading cause of cart abandonment. WooCommerce’s built-in checkout process is well-designed, but faster is better. While there are currently no reliable one-click checkout plugins available for WooCommerce, One Page Checkout speeds up the process so that users don’t have to click through multiple pages to make a purchase.

Follow up with shoppers

I was recently shopping for shirts on the site of a well-known retailer. After selecting a couple of shirts, I was distracted and promptly forgot about the whole thing. The next day, I received an email from the retailer with a list of items that were in my shopping cart and a link to the checkout page. I happily completed the order.
Reminder emails are surprisingly effective, empowering WooCommerce retailers to recover revenue and profits that would otherwise have been lost.

There are several abandoned cart email plugins available for WooCommerce, with Cart Abandonment Emails being among the most popular.

Remarketing

I have mixed feelings about the ads that follow me around the internet after I’ve visited some eCommerce stores, but there’s no doubt remarketing is effective.
Remarketing uses the ubiquitous presence of advertising platforms like Google’s AdWords and Facebook’s Custom Audiences to display targeted ad content to shoppers who have visited your WooCommerce store. Retargeting works by injecting a tracking pixel onto your store’s pages, allowing advertising networks to track shopper actions and later display relevant advertising content.
WooCommerce AdWords Dynamic Remarketing is a free plugin that integrates WooCommerce stores with Adwords remarketing.
Facebook Pixel by PixelYourSite will do the same for Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which includes remarketing functionality.
Proactive retailers are recovering a significant percentage of abandoned shopping carts, which represents a valuable increase in revenue. By improving the experience you offer shoppers and engaging with them when they abandon their cart, your store could improve its profit margins too.

Nexcess
Nexcess

Nexcess, the premium hosting provider for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento, is optimized for your hosting needs. Nexcess provides a managed hosting infrastructure, curated tools, and a team of experts that make it easy to build, manage, and grow your business online. Serving SMBs and the designers, developers, and agencies who create for them, Nexcess has provided fully managed, high-performance cloud solutions for more than 22 years.


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