WooCommerce and abandoned carts: how to automatically retrieve abandoned carts and increase sales

The worst thing that could happen to your store and damage your sales is a big amount of customers abandoning their cart before completing their purchase.

Despite the fact that this phenomenon has slightly decreased over the past two years, going from a 72% to a 68% abandoned cart report, these statistics are still alarming.

This drop is due to the increased familiarity customers have shown towards online sales and marketing strategies.

Sadly we can’t just rejoice over a couple of extra percentage points, since we are talking about a total amount of 4 trillion dollars loss.

If you want to know how much money you are losing monthly due to the shopping cart abandonment rate you can calculate the following:

• Your total monthly income / 0.32 = Your monthly loss

This means that if you earn 10.000 dollars each month, factoring in the shopping cart abandonment rate, you are losing 31.250 dollars. Monthly.

How can we avoid losing these earnings?

The main causes behind shopping cart abandonment

First off we should try to understand why is it that some of our customers drop out of their transactions, in order to be able to fix the root problems :

• Unexpected costs such as shipping fees may turn customers away. When a customer has a clear idea of just how much they are going to pay, it’s a bad thing to surprise them with a higher amount in the end.

That’s why I recommend you offer a free shipping system whenever possible, if used correctly it may increase the conversion rate and the average transaction value on your store.

• The checkout system is too complicated, to the point your customers feel lost and get tired of it before buying.

A good way to fix this problem is to divide the checkout process into a few setps, so that customers can focus on a few details at a time and clearly visualize how far they are from completing their purchase.

Sadly although it is important to fix these kind of problems, the cart abandonment rate stays high.

Is there a way to get back to those customers who already left your store, despite all of our precautions?

Recovering abandoned carts

Considering of the data we have mentioned before, it’s easy to understand why it’s important to get back to at least some of those customers.

Any time a customer leaves your store, you don’t know if they will be coming back or if they will shop elsewhere, that’s why the first thing to do is working towards keeping your customers loyal to your store.

You can do this in a few ways, such as using a discount system, a loyalty program and implementing a live chat to your store.

But how could you get back to unregistered customers? That huge chunk of your customer base that are still not loyal to your store?

An excellent way to do so is by creating an “abandoned cart email” which will send an automatic message to those who abandoned their cart before completing their transaction.

This way, you could send them an email notification reminding them they have a pending order, in order to:

• Customers will feel important, knowing that you remembered them.
• Find out if customers experience any kind of problem during the checkout.
• Keep customers coming back to your store.
• You can attach a discount voucher to these emails in order to drastically reduce the basket abandonment rate on your store.

An easy way to do this is by using the Recover Abandoned Cart plugin, which allows you to automate the whole abandoned cart recovery process by saving the data of those who filled in a checkout form and then left the store before completing their purchase, automatically sending an abandoned cart report email.

And you’re set: these are the best practices to reduce the cart abandonment rate on your store and the recommended ways to exploit the abandoned cart email service.