It’s frustrating for digital marketers to look at their monthly analytics and discover that a block of shoppers came this close to buying — only to exit the site.
NB: This is an article from Persado
Shopping cart abandonment remains one of the biggest challenges for many online businesses. To prevent it, digital marketers need to understand the root of the problem: abandoned cart vs. abandoned checkout?
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Are customers abandoning their carts or are they abandoning the checkout process? Let’s explore the differences and some of the solutions for each.
Abandoned Cart vs. Abandoned Checkout
First, some definitions.
The abandoned cart rate is the percentage of customers who place an item in a cart, then leave without completing a purchase, even if they still continue to browse.
Abandoned checkout rate is the percentage of customers who put an item in the cart and proceed to the checkout process, but abandon the purchase at some point during checkout.
Whether the issue is technically an abandoned cart vs. abandoned checkout is not clear for your e-commerce site’s shopping cart abandonment rate, which reflects both. The reason is that you calculate the rate by dividing the total number of completed transactions by the number of initiated sales and then subtracting the result from one and then multiplying by 100.
Research from Baymard Institute finds that the shopping cart abandonment rate in 2023 reached 70.19%. That means, for every 10 customers who add an item to an e-commerce shopping cart, seven leave a site without completing their purchase.
If you want to improve that rate for your business, you need to understand the root cause of the problem. That requires you to understand the different points at which people leave: abandoned cart vs. abandoned checkout (or a bit of both)? Also, why they decided not to move forward at that particular step.
Understanding Abandonment Statistics
Abandoned cart benchmarks vary by industry, as well as business size. For example, the cruise and travel industry maintains one of the highest abandoned cart rates, at 98%. PayPal’s research data from the second quarter of 2022 sheds some insight on the overall abandonment rate for desktop and mobile platforms:
- E-commerce desktop abandonment rate was 72%.
- Mobile abandonment rate was 84%.
Studies show that shopping cart abandonment rates peak each December when Black Friday and holiday sales lure impulsive prospects and window shoppers. To get at the root of the problem, it helps to understand why people are leaving.
Why Do Shoppers Abandon the Cart vs. Abandon Checkout Processes?
The psychology of shopping cart abandonment remains complicated, but developing insight on why some customers leave e-commerce sites without purchasing can help your brand bridge the gap and improve their abandoned cart recovery rate. Below are some of the top reasons people abandon a purchase:
