Checkout and Payments Cart abandonment: Explained Last updated on July 3rd, 2024 Customer acquisition costs are increasing, which makes it even more important to reduce cart and checkout abandonment – especially when you consider the average cart abandonment rate stands at 70%! Throwing more customers into the top of a leaky funnel isn’t efficient. So in order to help Ecommerce merchants understand the challenge, we’ve pulled together data from top industry sources and our own proprietary research in order to shine a light on cart abandonment. The mobile conversion challenge It’s no secret that mobile devices dominate consumer shopping behaviour. More than two-thirds (68%) of all e-commerce sessions happen on mobile devices. But the cart abandonment rate on mobile is a whopping 85.65%, compared to 73% on desktop. If your traffic looks anything like this, a big chunk of your potential revenue might be disappearing right before your eyes. Next step: Prioritise your mobile cart and checkout experience, this is likely to be your biggest opportunity for ROI How does acquisition impact abandonment? Not all traffic sources are created equal when it comes to cart abandonment. Customer journey mapping research by Hotjar found that users who land on e-commerce websites from social media platforms have the highest abandonment rate at 91%. Social media users are more likely to be in a browsing or research mode rather than being ready to complete a purchase. In contrast, the traffic source with the lowest cart abandonment rate is search (76%), followed by direct traffic (79%) and email (84%). Next step: Segment your data by channel to fully understand your own customer behaviour. It could be that there are huge channel specific opportunities for growth. How does cart abandonment vary by sector? It’s an obvious, but important, point that different sectors experience varying cart abandonment rates. Higher price points and longer buying cycles have a big impact on how likely a customer is to abandon their cart. And these stats from SaleCycle reflect that: Home Furnishing: 90.50% Automotive: 85.97% Jewellery: 84.49% Telecommunications: 90.76% On the flip side, essentials that require frequent restocking and have a lower price point tend to have lower abandonment rates: Groceries: 50.03% Pharmaceuticals: 70.06% Cosmetics: 70.11% Next step: Benchmark yourself against your competitors within your sector to understand how your UX stacks up in your industry. Age isn’t just a number Shoppers between the ages of 25 and 34 have the highest tendency to abandon their carts (21%), closely followed by the 35-44 age group (20%). If your target customers belong to one of these groups, it’s crucial to understand what drives them to leave their carts more than other age groups. Hint: based on our research, this is likely to be your choice of payment options! GENE Commerce: The checkout experts. When it comes to checkout success and the world of online payments, our experience does the talking. If you’re struggling to understand your customer behaviour, or effectively prioritise your roadmap – we can help. Email [email protected] for a FREE checkout audit.
