How will you feel if every single person that came to your online store made a purchase? Business will be pretty good, right?
I like to think that every business owner’s dream is to be able to make a sale anytime a potential customer walks through that door or in your case, open up your online store on their browser.
Unfortunately that’s not always the case when it comes to online businesses, there are people who come in, look around, and move on to do something else without making any purchases. This can be a nightmare.
If you could envision it in your head, you will see a woman open your store’s door and you will hear the doorbell ring to announce her arrival.
You will quickly put up your best smiling face as she picks up a shopping basket and walks around your store.
You will see her reach out to pick up one of your products from the shelf, look at the name and features for some time, then looks at the price tag, and smile as if she has finally found what she has been looking for.
You will notice the smile and a warm feeling starts building up in your belly. At the back of your mind, you are sure of a sale.
Just then her phone will ring, and she will take the call. After which she will drop the product, return the shopping basket and walk away from your store.
A lot of things will be going on in your head, what the friggin hell just happened? Why didn’t she buy the product? She was genuinely interested. Why did she change her mind all so sudden?
Was it because of the call she had received? What was the content of the call? Was there an emergency? Had the caller given her negative feedback about your store to dissuade her from buying from you? Did the caller give her a cheaper offer?
But the strangest thing is that about 65-67% of the people that walked into your shop that day did the same thing!
They looked at a few products, showed genuine interest, and walked away from your shop without making a purchase!
That’s gonna leave a scar, and you are probably going to be up all night wondering what was wrong and how to fix it.
The above-mentioned scenario can be translated into the online shopping world and it’s even more common.
People come to your online shop and add your products to their cart only for them to “abandon the cart” and leave your website.
And when you go through your stats, you will also be up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
Why Do Customers Abandon Carts During Checkout?
More often than not, potential customers come across online stores to check out a product or two, show genuine interest and even add them to their cart, but they end up not buying. Instead they abandon the cart, go away and never return.
When a user adds items to the cart but does not complete the purchase process, the cart is considered abandoned. And this can happen for various reasons.
According to research by shopify, 67% of shoppers leave the checkout page and do not complete the purchase. Even with a good copy, 20% to 25% of the shoppers will abandon the purchase process.
From a recent survey conducted by Baymard on 2500+ people, some of the several reasons why people abandoned carts (excluding the window shoppers category) include:
- Unexpected additional costs such as shipping, handling fees and taxes
- Checkout processes that involved new account creation or logging in, or storing of customer payment information
- A long or complicated checkout process
- Returns policy that wasn’t satisfactory
- Not enough payment methods, or credit card was declined
- The website had errors or experienced crashes
Reasons for Abandonments during checkout (source: baymard.com)
If you are an eCommerce website owner, you need to figure out a way to recover these customers so they can return to complete the buying process by actually making a purchase. If you don’t, you will be losing potential buyers and increased revenue from sales.
Many, if not all, eCommerce shop owners face this dilemma; even the giant online stores like Amazon, eBay, etc, and they are more than willing to plunge thousands of dollars on means to solve, or at least reduce to a great extent, the problem of cart abandonment by potential customers.
They create strategic plans to, or re-engage customers, encourage them to return, and retain their attention for a more extended period, so they can complete the purchase and the store can recover lost sales.
While you may not have thousands of dollars lying around to fix this issue, there are far cheaper options to remedy this issue of cart abandonment that you should strongly consider.
Infact, it stands to reason that the cost of recovering an abandoned cart should be much lower than the cost of acquiring a new customer, otherwise it’s just not worth the trouble.
If you are an eCommerce store owner, I am sure you are more than willing to do whatever you can to solve the issue of cart abandonment and recover potential buyers back to your online store so you can increase sales and maximize profits, right?
What Is WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery?
Cart abandonment recovery is an e-commerce feature that helps store owners recover potential customers that had abandoned carts in their e-commerce by encouraging them to return to complete their purchase and increase sales.
This is typically done by sending automated follow-up emails or SMS for every abandoned cart action on your eCommerce store.
What this means is that when a person makes an attempt to buy something from your e-commerce store and fails to complete the purchase before leaving the website, the website will notice and automatically send emails or SMS to the person’s email address or phone number to try to convince them to come back and complete the purchase.
Imagine what that can do for business. That lady that left the store from our analogy earlier—imagine you could send her a friendly reminder about the product she almost bought earlier, and the next day she returned to buy it, and probably another product with it!
And as she makes payment, she tells you that she didn’t make the purchase initially because she’s a doctor who was called in for an emergency at the moment, and that she had even forgotten about the product afterwards, until she saw your message.
Then as you hand over the bagged products to her, she further tells you that she is really amazed that you cared enough to reach out to her, and promised to be a returning customer.
I’m sure you will be more than happy to have made the attempt to recover her back, right?
This is what e-commerce cart abandonment recovery is all about, and you will agree with me that the abandoned cart recovery feature will be a great asset to any e-commerce business since its sole purpose is to help store owners recover potential customers and increase sales.
How To Recover Abandoned Carts in WooCommerce Powered eCommerce Stores?
Many websites are powered on WordPress, and the WooCommerce plugin has grown since its inception in 2011 by WooThemes, to become the favorite e-commerce solution for WordPress websites.
With Woocommerce, you can easily transform a simple WordPress site into a fully-fledged e-commerce store.
The Woocommerce plugin allows shop owners to display and sell their products online, manage customer orders, receive payments with multiple methods securely, as well as provide statistics/inventory.
Because of it’s vast usage as e-commerce solution in the WordPress community, lots of WordPress developers have created plugins to extend the capabilities of the WooCommerce plugin.
There are plugins for adding and connecting more payment gateways like PayPal payment gateway, Paystack and Flutterwave payment gateways, Wish Lists, e-receipts and invoicing for customers, order fulfilment and product tracking, and many others to the store.
WooCommerce alone doesn’t have the feature to provide details about abandoned carts. There are plugins created by other developers to add this feature to your online store. They all have their pros and cons.
If your eCommerce store is built using WooCommerce, one sure way to resolve the issue of cart abandonment is the use of a reliable WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin.
Of all the Woocommerce cart abandonment plugins out there, our favorites which we use for our customers e-commerce and e-learning websites are the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery by CartFlows Inc and the Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce by Tyche Softwares.
How Does The WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery Work?
When a customer adds a product (or products) to the cart, the next point of contact is usually the checkout page.
In the checkout page the customer is usually expected to fill a form or create an account by entering some basic information about him or her, such as his or her name, email address, phone number, etc before being taken to the payment page.
If the customer already has an account, then they are required to log in.
Some customers will fill the checkout form as a guest or login, but then terminate the purchase, or proceed to the payment gateway and terminate the process without payment, therefore not completing purchase in either case.
This is usually referred to as cart abandonment—because they most likely left without removing the product(s) already added to the cart.
When installed and activated on your e-commerce store, a woocommerce cart abandonment recovery plugin will capture and save the email address of the customer when entered in the checkout form.
It then monitors the customer action on the website. If the customer abandons the cart and doesn’t complete the purchase, the plugin will automatically start sending a series of time-bound follow-up emails to the customer to try to convince him or her to come back to complete the purchase.
Don’t get carried away! The plugin is not an A.I that will craft an email or decide what to send and when to the customer. You have to do that first.
You need to craft a really good series of emails with different copy and CTAs, and set the sequence and time interval that the emails will get sent.
If possible, you can use the woocommerce cart abandonment recovery plugin to generate unique limited-time discount coupons and send them automatically via email to entice customers.
Then based on your customization, the plugin can automatically reach out to your lost customers and send them the emails you have written.
Through the email series, you can attempt to recover the customer back to your store by:
- sending a reminder the customer to complete the purchase,
- asking for feedback for why the customer don’t make the purchase—you can make a concrete decision on what to do based on the feedback,
- or offering a custom (limited) discount that will entice potential buyers to complete the purchase.
Once your WooCommerce cart abandonment set up has been successfully completed, your e-commerce store will start recovering your lost sales.
With the woocommerce cart abandonment recovery plugin, you can send as many emails as you would like—absolutely free!
You will also get an overview of how many abandoned carts have been made, and the emails already sent behind the scenes, and how much lost revenue has been recovered on autopilot.
You can use this information to optimize your cart abandonment sequence emails, and increase conversion and sales.
Below is just an example of email sequence you can have:
- 1st email after 30 minutes: Ask if there was any technical issue and if you can be able to help. If you have a page that shows customers how to successfully make a purchase in your store, you can also refer them to the link.
- 2nd email after 24 hours: Send a reminder to complete the purchase, probably highlighting the benefits of the product.
- 3rd email after 72 hours: Offer a unique, limited time discount coupon. You could give them a 20% off one-day limited discount.
You can always go ahead and test it by trying to make a purchase and abandoning the cart to confirm that it is working.
Conclusion
Sadly, many e-commerce store owners and even web design agencies don’t do anything about the problem of cart abandonment, and that deprives store owners of the opportunity to have more sales and increase their business’s revenue. Instead, they potentially lose thousands to millions of naira every month!
Don’t be counted among those statistics. Make the effort to reduce cart abandonment in your e-commerce store. If you don’t have Cart Abandonment Recovery, you can contact us at Five Digital to set it up for you.
Here at Five Digital, we set up Cart Abandonment Recovery for every e-commerce and e-learning website we create. We also continuously monitor, analyze, and report Cart Abandonment Recovery statistics for our clients that opt on for our e-commerce maintenance and support service.
What do you think about Cart Abandonment Recovery? We’ll like to hear your opinion in the comment section below.
Also, if you already have abandoned cart recovery on your site, tell us how it has helped you increase your store revenue as we’d love to know!