"I am super satisfied with my WooCommerce cart abandonment numbers!" Said no store owner, ever.
Cart abandonment is when a site visitor adds a product to their online cart then leaves without completing checkout. It’s the digital equivalent of walking into a physical store and putting an item in your shopping basket, then changing your mind and walking out without buying anything.
While there’s no way to eliminate this situation completely, there are ways to reduce the abandonment rate on your WooCommerce store. To do this, we need to first understand why customers are ditching their cart, then find ways to address these reasons.
Common Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment on WooCommerce Stores
Before you can reduce WooCommeerce abandoned cart rates on your store, you need to know why customers are dropping off in the first place. Here are some of the most common reasons.
Not Ready to Buy
Sometimes it’s not you, it’s them. The customer simply might not be ready to buy just yet. They could be window-shopping, doing product comparisons, or planning a future purchase.
In other words, this reason is nothing personal to your product or checkout experience. It just means the customer wasn’t planning on completing checkout in the first place.
Hidden Shipping Costs
Imagine adding a cool hat to your online cart thinking it’s going to cost you $20, only to find out at the checkout page that the site charges $10 for shipping. Sheesh, that’s half another hat!
Surprise shipping costs are the number one reason for WooCommerce cart abandonment, especially for shoppers who only wanted to buy a single item. Most shoppers expect to see the final cost of their purchase, including shipping and taxes, before they reach the checkout page.
And yet, most online stores don’t calculate and display shipping costs until late into checkout, after the shopper has entered their address. Don’t be one of those stores.
Mandatory Account Creation
Oblige your customers to create an account is adding one more step to the buying process and making it slower, which can discourage them to finalize the purchase.
This happens, especially when the form to create the account has a ton of fields to fill out! This was supposed to be a shopping trip, not an admin shift. Chances are, your almost-customers will be frustrated over the wasted time and abandon their shopping cart.
High Pricing
You might be thinking, if the price was high, why did the shopper add the item to their cart in the first place?Online shoppers will often add desired items to their cart and then do the same thing on one or more other sites to see which one comes out to the best final price.
Whichever cart was more expensive will be abandoned. For this reason, it’s important to regularly compare your prices to those of your competitors, before your customers do.
Lack of Trust
If your website looks sketchy (we’re talking few or poor reviews and missing security badges and certificates), don’t be surprised when your cart abandonment is high.
Shoppers need to provide a lot of sensitive information to buy something online, like their credit card and billing information. If your website doesn’t look trustworthy, shoppers will be more hesitant to hand this information over.
Complicated Checkout Process
Shippers are highly likely to abandon their cart because the checkout process is too long or complicated.Many online stores have around 15 form fields for shoppers to fill out to complete checkout. When it comes to checkout design, less is more. The fewer steps a shopper needs to take to complete checkout, the less chance they have to abandon the process.
Poor Support
No matter how seamless your checkout experience is, if you don’t address shoppers’ questions at the right time throughout the flow, you’ll end up with an abandoned cart.
Sure, you might have an FAQ page on your website. But how findable is it? Is it scannable enough for your visitors to actually read it?
Including relevant information at the right times throughout the checkout process will help instill confidence in shoppers. Better yet, having the option to live chat with a customer service rep to get any questions they have answered right away can be a game-changer.
Lack of Payment Options
Everyone has a preferred payment method, whether it’s Visa, Amex, or PayPal, for instance. Ensuring these different methods are accepted on your WooCommerce store allows you to cater to all audiences and improve customer experience.
How to Reduce WooCommerce Cart Abandonment
Now that we’ve gone over what causes WooCommerce cart abandonment, let’s go over some ways to reduce it.
Provide Discount or Free Shipping
WooCommerce abandoned cart - provide discount or free shipping
Source: Structube
Hidden shipping costs are the biggest reason for cart abandonment. To fix that, it’s important to—first off—provide a discount or even free shipping. An information bar positioned at the top of your site is the most common way to let customers know you offer free shipping.
If you can’t afford to provide free shipping, then you need to make sure shoppers can see what the will pay with the shipping fee added, before they enter the checkout flow.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
WooCommerce abandoned cart - offer multiple payment options
Source: ADIDAS
Offering multiple payment options will make sure you’re catering to all of your potential customers’ preferred methods. For example, some shoppers refuse to enter their credit card information online and will only use PayPal.
Similarly, some customers prefer to use Google Wallet and Apple Pay, two methods that have yet to become standard quite yet. Adding these to your WooCommerce site can help set you apart and take your visitors to the checkout finish line.
Include Social Proof and Trust Icons
A lot of people are wary about entering their personal details online, like their contact information, credit card number, and shipping address. They may give up on a purchase, if they don’t see recognizable trust logos on your website, such as security badges
Some examples of seals you could use are:
- Money-back guarantee seals
- Secure payment icons
- Logos of accepted payment options
- SSL security badges
- Industry award badges
When shoppers see these icons on your WooCommerce site, it will increase their confidence in the legitimacy of your site, and the risk of them abandoning their cart will be far less likely.
Allow Guest Checkout
WooCommerce abandoned cart - allow guest checkout
Source: Crate & Barrel
Look, we totally get the logic behind asking shoppers to create an account to complete their purchase. Getting their email address and being able to recognize their purchase decisions will mean you can send them personalized marketing campaigns. However, it could cost you sales.
By offering a guest checkout option, you can leave it up to customers to leave their information, or simply complete their purchase without signing up. You could always try offering incentives like loyalty programs to motivate them to choose the prior option.
Offer Live Chat Support
Live chat = higher conversion rates. Oftentimes, a shopper will have a question or concern blocking them from buying something.
Implementing live chat software (like JivoChat) will empower you to offer support during the checkout process, allowing shoppers to get their questions answered in real-time and complete their purchase.
WooCommerce abandoned cart - offer live chat support
Shoppers like to chat with real humans, so ideally you’d have a dedicated team of support specialists on hand to offer personalized responses. But you could also use chatbots to deliver pre-programmed responses that use natural language. Doing this will have a huge impact on reducing cart abandonment in your WooCommerce store.
How to Recover Abandoned Carts on WooCommerce
There are a lot of tactics to recover abandoned carts on WooCommerce, but these are some of the more actionable and effective ones.
WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails
If the shopper entered their email address during the checkout process before abandoning their cart, you have the opportunity to send them an abandoned cart email. This usually includes an offer or promo code to motivate them to come back and complete their purchase.
WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Retargeting
Another effective cart recovery tactic is ad retargeting. This when you place an ad pixel on your checkout page so that if shoppers do abandon cart, you can then remarket the products in their cart to them on external platforms like Google and Facebook.
This is great because it lets you capture shoppers that started checkout, even if you weren’t able to get their email address yet.
WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Plugins
One of the biggest benefits of using WooCommerce is their growing library of free and paid extensions to help you enhance your logistical, technical, and marketing needs. Abandoned cart recovery being one of them.
5 Best WooCommerce Cart Abandonment and Recovery Plugins
Ready to start recovering some of those abandoned carts? Here are the top 4 WooCommerce abandoned cart plugins to help you do just that.
1. Retainful
WooCommerce abandoned cartt rate - Retainful
Source: Retainful
Retainful is an easy-to-use tool that can be added to your WooCommerce store and help recover abandoned carts by sending shoppers a series of follow-up emails. No coding required.
You can choose the number of abandoned cart reminder emails you want to send out and build them easily using templates. Retainful also lets you send coupon codes that shoppers can use on their next order to further incentivize them to come back and complete their purchase.
This plugin is available in both free and paid versions, with the paid version starting at $15 per month. There’s also a "Pay for what you use" offer available for up to 2000 contacts.
Key features:
- Automatically send abandoned cart reminders to shoppers when they leave something in their cart
- Continue to follow up with shoppers automatically with a strategically timed email sequence that stops once the cart has been recovered
- You can send unlimited abandoned cart email reminders
- Personalize emails with the shopper’s name and more through shortcodes
- Generate detailed cart abandonment reports that include recovered value, abandoned cart value, and more
- Generate unique coupon codes (percentage or flat price) on each purchase
- Include expiration dates on coupons to drive buying urgency
- Earn more customers through the Retainful referral program which sends a refer-a-friend link to your customers after their purchase
2. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
WooCommerce abandoned cart - WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
Source: CodeCanyon
This WooCommerce plugin helps you recover abandoned carts by tracking both registered and guest shoppers and notifying them via email when they leave an item in their cart without checking out.
The abandoned cart recovery emails can be made to include coupons with expiry dates to urge customers to move quickly in their purchase decision.
The WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart plugin is available for a one-time fee of $49.
Key features:
- Track and records abandoned carts
- Recover abandoned carts with automated emails
- Email templates make designing your emails easy
- Works for both account holders and guests
- User Click on emails is recorded for you to analyze which templates work best
- Choose exactly what time you want recovery emails to be sent
- Automatic coupon code generation
- WPML, WPML String Translation, and WooCommerce Multilingual Compatibility for email (you’ll need all these 3 Plugins for multi-language email functionality)
- Captures phone numbers as well for manual follow-up
3. YITH
WooCommerce abandoned cart - YITH
Source: YITH
What sets YITH apart from other WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery plugins is its multi-currency compatibility. This is perfect for WooCommerce stores operating in multiple countries.
YITH works by sending coupons and customized emails to shoppers who have abandoned their cart. This works for both registered and guest users, as long as they’ve provided their email addresses during the checkout process.
You can choose how many follow-up emails to send out before the plugin empties all the abandoned carts that weren’t recovered.
The premium version of this plugin starts at $79.99 per year.
Key features:
- Supports WooCommerce Multi-Currency (WOOMC)
- WPML compatibility lets you recover the domain where carts are abandoned to customize emails with the correct language
- Choose when to empty all abandoned carts that weren’t recovered
- Works with both registered account holders and guests
- Detailed reporting of all carts that were recovered by the plugin, as well as which as a list of all abandoned carts
- Create different types of emails for your shoppers
- Highly customizable email templates
- Automatically generate coupon codes
4. Automate Woo
Woocommerce abandoned cart - Automate Woo
Source: WooCommerce Follow-Ups
Automate Woo is another great plugin option. When added to your store, it’ll engage your customers by creating custom drip campaigns based on their interests and purchase history. This includes—you guessed it—cart recovery emails.
Key features:
- Simple email creation
- Group follow-ups into drip campaigns
- Detailed reporting
- Capture both registered account holders and guests
- REST API
- Google Analytics integration
- Free and custom templates
- Personalized coupons
5. JivoChat
JivoChat provides an omnichannel eCommerce experience to your WooCommerce store visitors. You can re-engage shoppers through multiple different digital channels from the dashboard and help reduce abandonment.
What do we mean by omnichannel? Live chats on your website, messages to your Facebook page, messages to your company’s email address, and calls to a phone number in any country all go to one convenient JivoChat app.
So your customers can message you through the platform they like best, and you only need to check one inbox to see them all.
Key features:
- Track your shoppers in real-time and proactively initiate live chats with them based on conditions you’ve set
- Access Facebook messages easily without needing to log in or open a new tab
- Automatically translate live chat conversations in both directions instantly and fluently
- Create pre-written messages and send them by using hotkeys so you can quickly respond to common questions
- See the messages that visitors are typing before they hit "send," to give you more time to respond effectively
- CRM Integrations, API, Webhooks, and Mobile SDK let you connect your other tools to JivoChat to build out a robust support system
- Instant callbacks
- 24/7 support
