Incomplete Order: Why you should care about Shopping Cart Abandoners

Many online shop merchants face different challenges in e-commerce. Today’s customers have high expectations of a virtual shopping experience and so numerous factors play an important role. Order incompletion has become a growing problem in recent years. Shoppers cheerfully fill their shopping cart, but at the decisive moment the order is cancelled. If online retailers do not manage to take care of shopping cart abandonment in time, a lot of sales potential is being missed out.

Why is it important to take care of incomplete orders?

Around 90% of prospects who visit an online shop do not convert. They look around and leave without purchase. The customer journey is over before it gets started. If a visitor nevertheless fills his shopping cart, this is by no means a guarantee for a purchase, although at this stage he has already reached an advanced phase within his customer journey. Around 70% abandon the cart at this point and most online retailers accept these cart abandoners as given. However, if you consider that these order cancellations cause losses of between 50 million and 1 billion per year in Germany, the obvious should become a new incentive to take a closer look at the untapped potential.

Potentials and risks of incomplete orders

If a shop visitor leaves the website without completing his purchase, he obviously has a hurdle ahead of him. If an online shop has a high rate of cart abandonment, there is great potential for optimisation on the customer journey.

So until the final purchase is made, the visitor has to go through various steps that lead to the goal. If one of them is not in the customer’s interest, the probability of cart abandonment is high. Stumbling blocks and thus hidden potentials are, among others:

• The customer has to register for a purchase
• Checkout on mobile devices is too time-consuming
• Important information, such as shipping costs or payment options, is only displayed at the end of the process
• The shipping costs are too high
• The payment methods offered are not the right ones for the visitor

Cart abandoners already show interest in a product, because otherwise there would be no products in their shopping cart. The likelihood of purchase is therefore significantly higher than for interested parties without interaction. Ultimately, it is only the avoidable hurdles that lead to an order cancellation. Often there is also a lack of the final conviction that can bring the order dropout back. The good news: challenges that lead to order abandonment can be quickly and easily adjusted in the online shop. The potential of the measures is great, because even with little effort, order cancellations can be prevented, which in comparison is significantly cheaper than acquiring new customers. Only when it comes to payment methods do shop operators bear a certain risk.

The risk of payment methods

Some payment methods are more popular than others. For example, customers appreciate purchase on account, which allows them to pay for a product only after receiving it. For the online merchant, however, this can mean having to wait a long time for payments or, in case of doubt, even having to accept losses if orders cannot be paid. The trend is also towards payment by credit card and e-payment methods, which makes secure payment convenient for both sides. In general, the payment methods should meet the demands of the target group, otherwise cart abandonments will remain the norm.

Effects of neglected cart abandonment

If online merchants neglect order dropouts, this can have a negative impact on various areas, because it is not only turnover that is affected:

• High loss of sales due to permanent incomplete orders
• High costs due to ineffective investments in marketing campaigns
• Loss of existing customers who face the same hurdles again and again and therefore look to the competition
• Creation of a negative image, because customers talk more often to friends, acquaintances and in social networks about negative experiences than about positive ones
• The conversion rate remains low if no measures are taken against order cancellations
• The acquisition of new customers stagnates because they do not complete the purchase and become cart abandoners

How to smartly convert cart abandoners into customers

With an intelligent tool like uptain, cart abandoners can be brought back automatically in a smart way.

Exit-Intent Popups are used at exactly the right moment and prevent cart abandonment shortly before the visitor leaves the website. The smart technology from uptain recognises, among other things, by the movement of the mouse pointer whether the customer wants to leave the shop with a full shopping cart – without having completed the purchase. If this is the case, a popup appears with content that addresses the individual needs of the order abandoner and convinces him or her to make a purchase. This can be, for example, discount codes or service offers. This option already significantly reduces the number of order cancellations. But even after the purchase process has been cancelled, shopping cart abandoners are not completely lost.

Abandoned Cart Emails offer an automated way to bring shopping cart abandoners back into the ordering process and convert them into customers. This involves direct and individually adapted communication with the customer, so that around 30% of incomplete orders are won back.

Take care of shopping cart abandonment

Cart abandonment offers enormous potential. With the appropriate measures, not only the short-term turnover can be increased. By winning back cart abandoners, you ensure strengthened customer loyalty and automated new customer acquisition in the long term. In addition to the necessary optimisations along the customer journey (e.g. checkout optimisations), uptain takes care of your customers thanks to smart technologies and prevents the negative effects of neglected shopping cart abandonment.