Statistics show that, while numbers can vary between industries, the overall rate of cart abandonment is 73.9%. Reasons for abandonment vary, with distraction, confusion, security, mobile accessibility, and delivery costs being the most common.

As many as 75% of people who abandon carts, do so intending to return and complete their purchase later.

Both BigCommerce and Shopify stores feature cart recovery functionality. Developing a cart abandonment strategy to use with these tools will help you to save those otherwise lost sales.

Stage your mails

Most large online retailers will send you an email within an hour of you abandoning a cart. Many customers will abandon just because other things distract them at the time, but will return if reminded. Customers are most likely to re visit and complete their purchase while the product is still fresh in their mind.

Include contact details

Customers who left their cart to look for further information, or due to frustration with the website or technical issues may be able to be saved by your customer service. Make it clear how they can contact you, and how quickly they can expect you to reply.

Include images of the item

Including a photo of the image they abandoned instantly jogs the customer’s memory. They may have left your website to look at other options or do further research, and may have plain forgotten the item left in your cart. You can help them with research by including customer reviews for the item, images of similar items and suggestions for add on purchases even.

Get the call to action right

As with everything in e-commerce, the call to action is key. Make it clear, make it easy. This means a call to action that leads back to their original cart. If they have to start from scratch, they may just give up again.

Offer discount

Of course you don’t want to teach customers that abandoning their cart will earn them discount, but there is absolutely a place for a cleverly offered discount to be used as part of a cart abandonment strategy. Delivery costs are one of the most common reasons for cart abandonment, and so offering free delivery as the second or third stage of your strategy can be enough to save a significant proportion of abandoned carts. The offer of a discount can recover carts, but its time limited discount offers that create the urgency to recover the most carts.