How To Recover Abandoned Carts For WooCommerce?

One of the biggest challenges in online selling is cart abandonment. A cart that is abandoned will be lost forever if timely recovery is not done. To recover abandoned carts on WooCommerce, you need a strategic plan- a plan that is spontaneous and focuses upon winning back lost customers.

In this article, I’ll be sharing 7 tactics to recover abandoned carts for your WooCommerce store. While a foolproof cart abandonment recovery strategy is subjective to the various metrics or types of products a business sells, there are some common tactics that you can consider in your WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery strategy. Also, I’ll be sharing an amazing solution developed by MakeWebBetter to recover abandoned carts on WooCommerce.

What Are Abandoned Carts?

No article or any piece will be considered complete without the definition of abandoned carts. Therefore, maintaining the traditions I’ll begin this article with the most basic yet very important questions – what is abandoned carts?

The activity of adding products to the cart and right before completing the checkout process the customer leaves your WooCommerce store is called cart abandonment.

While it is very hard to forecast an abandoned cart in your store in advance, sadly it is an inevitable truth of online shopping for which every merchant should be prepared. There are many reasons why people perform cart abandonment like high shipping costs, slow loading websites, or price comparisons.

Finding the specific cause can be a bit challenging but understanding the shoppers’ behavior can be very helpful in planning your WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery strategy. Before that, we’ll see some of the major reasons behind cart abandonment.

Why Shoppers Abandon Carts?

The Baymard Institute conducted a study in which it was found that on average 69.80% of average retailers documented cart abandonment. This simply depicts that cart abandonment is an inevitable part of the eCommerce industry. One of the biggest reasons behind cart abandonment is the way people browse online stores.

Even shopping activities like window shopping, comparing prices, or saving items for later largely contribute to the cart abandonments. But apart from these natural factors, some quantitative factors were covered in the study by the Baymard Institute.

These reasons comprise of:

1. Extra Costs

Apart from the price of the products a shopper has to pay for many other expenses like taxes, shipping prices, and other hidden charges. These overhead expenses often form one of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment in WooCommerce.

The hidden charges that are levied on the customers often come as a surprise as a result, shoppers leave without completing the checkout process.

Extra costs as you can see in the study are the biggest reason for cart abandonment and it holds the biggest share of 55%.

2. Had To Create An Account

After extra costs, the next big factor for cart abandonment is the absence of a guest login feature during checkout. You’ll be shocked to know that 23% of users will abandon their shopping cart if they have to create a new user account.

While customer retention is a very important part of online selling, it is not everything. We can also say this way round creating customer accounts is not the only way to retain customers.

Let’s face it while exploring through new online I just want to buy my stuff without having to sign up for future offers email notifications. Therefore, in such situations, guest checkout plays a very important role.

3. Too Long or Complex Process and Slow Delivery

Another two big factors for cart abandonment are long or complex shopping experience and slow delivery. Shipping and fulfillment play a very important role in online selling.

If you want your customers to relish your products they need to be delivered. In many cases, it was found that the shoppers abandoned the carts because the delivery was too slow or the delivery time was longer than expected.

The next big reason behind cart abandonment is longer and more complex shopping processes. Asking the customers to fill out lengthy forms and collecting unnecessary customer information all account for disrupting the user experience. In many cases, customers expect a one-click checkout to complete their purchase.

4. Unsecured Shopping Environment

In the study, it was found that approximately 17% of shoppers left the checkout process incomplete because they didn’t trust the website was secure for making payments. Security is an all-time concern when it comes to online shopping. Since there have been many cases of data thefts on the internet in the recent past, shoppers feel hesitant in shopping from unsecured sites.

5. Unsatisfactory Return Policies

Did you know the refund and return policy is the first thing that 68% of shoppers check before buying goods from an online store?

If you have a return policy that is unsatisfactory or difficult to understand you might end up losing a huge number of potential customers.

6. Website Crashes

Whether eCommerce or non-eCommerce, user experience is the foundation of website design. It often happens that the site crashes or some errors occur when a customer is browsing your store. Even slow page loads also hamper the user experience of an online store.

If this same situation occurs when a customer is about to make a purchase or is on the checkout page, it will turn into an abandoned cart. This forms the reason behind the 11% of abandoned carts.

7. Lack Of Enough Payment Methods

Last but not least in the Baymard Institute study, it was found that 7% of customers abandoned a cart because their choice of payment mode was absent. In the world of digital payments, preferences vary from customer to customer therefore, it is very important to accept payments through multiple channels.

So these were some of the prominent reasons directly from the mouth of customers. While creating an online store with WooCommerce you can consider all these reasons to keep the abandonment rate low right from the beginning.

7 Best Practices For WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery

Whether you run your business on WooCommerce, Shopify or Bigcommerce abandoned carts are bound to happen. Therefore, you need a solution that helps you in making informed decisions and a planned strategy to recover the lost sales.

Thanks to the large pool WooCommerce plugins that let you recover abandoned carts with ease and win back lost customers.

But depending on the plugins isn’t enough and there are several factors (mentioned earlier) that need to be addressed. Therefore, I’ll be sharing with you how to tackle these cart abandoning factors with some of the best eCommerce best practices.

By making small tweaks and keeping the aforementioned factors in mind you can recover a prominent number of your WooCommerce abandoned carts.

With that being said, let’s see some effective and important tactics to recover WooCommerce abandoned carts or prevent them from happening at all!

1. Keep The Cart Symbol Vivid

Online shoppers often tend to add products to their carts and review them later. However, in the world of online shopping, the human attention span is very short. Therefore, your customers might forget that they have added items to their cart.

Thus, you must display the current cart status of your customers on your WooCommerce store. If I have to give an example, I would mention Amazon.

Amazon shows the current cart status of a customer on every page of the store along with the subtotal and products purchased.

In WooCommerce almost every theme comes with a dedicated shopping cart icon. It can be located on the top right corner of the website or in the navigation bar. But if you’re using a theme without a cart icon you need to add one right away.

You can either do this by extending the code of the theme but for this, you need to have some prior coding experience. The other way is to take the help of the WooCommerce Menu Cart plugin. Once you’ve installed the plugin and activated it in your WooCommerce environment navigate: WooCommerce → Menu Cart Setup.

Now configure the settings for the cart icon on your WooCommerce store. Once configured don’t forget to save the settings.

The shoppers on your WooCommerce store can also see the products they added to their carts along with the subtotal. This little tweak is a very basic yet very effective tactic for WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery and can do wonders for you.

2. Implement An Exit-Intent Popup

Popups appear precisely when a user moves the mouse outside the browser window. Today almost every eCommerce site owner uses these pop-ups for a simple reason – they drive results.

Here are some of the lucrative benefits of exit intent:

• You can grow your email list substantially from 4% to 7%.
• With the help of exit-intent popups, you can boost your conversion rates from 10% to 60%.
• Store owners that considered the exit-intent popups saw growth in their email list as high as 1,375%.

As a shopper, I have witnessed the fact that I tend to doubt my purchase decision at the last minute. Thus, I need reassurance that as a shopper I have made the best decision by purchasing from the store. Therefore, exit-intent popups can be a great tactic to recover abandoned carts and encourage your customers to complete the checkout process.

3. Keep Guest Checkout Option Enable

The purpose behind creating a customer account on an eCommerce site is to make the checkout process quick. However, there’s a large audience that just wants to buy your services without having to create an account.

Thus, enabling the guest checkout option can be a fruitful tactic to recover and prevent abandoned carts at the checkout.

To enable the guest checkout on your WooCommerce store trace the following steps:

1. Navigate to the WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy.
2. Under the Accounts & Privacy tab, find the Guest checkout option.
3. Click the checkbox beside “Allow customers to place orders without an account” to enable the guest checkout.

Now the question arises will I be able to store enough customer information?

The answer is yes, you’ll be able to store enough customer information to process orders on your WooCommerce store.

4. Avoid Hidden Costs And Charges

As we saw in the previous section of this article 49% of shoppers abandon their carts because of extra costs and shipping cost is among them. It often happens that customers leave the checkout process incomplete due to high shipping costs because they were unaware of the shipping charges.

However, you can tackle this problem by simply showing the shipping cost upfront. If you’re aware of the exact shipping costs of the product you can show it in the product description. Otherwise, you can use WooCommerce extensions if the shipping costs vary for each product on your website.

Table Rate Shipping is an incredible solution by WooCommerce that allows merchants to define variable shipping rates for their products.

How can this prevent or recover WooCommerce abandoned carts?

With the help of this add-on, your customers can see the shipping costs even for products that have variable pricing before adding them to the cart. As a result, the shopper makes an informed decision about your products and services before adding them to the cart.

5. Offer Multiple Payment Methods

As said by me before, by making simple tweaks to your WooCommerce store you can recover abandoned carts with ease. With that being said, another tactic is to offer payments through multiple payment gateways.

Approximately 7% of shoppers abandon their carts because they couldn’t find their choice of payment mode on the checkout page. Therefore, at MakeWebBetter our experts recommend every WooCommerce store owner to keep multiple payment options on your store. We even strive to make WooCommerce addons compatible with the prominent payment gateways around the world.

To manage your payment gateways on your store:

1. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Payments
2. Under the Payments tab, you can manage your payment gateways.

But remember each payment gateway has its processing fees and transaction charges that have to be considered as a business owner.

6. Allow Customers To Save Cart Later

While doing online shopping I often browse multiple websites before buying a product to make price comparisons. To save from the hassle of searching the products again I add them to the shopping cart and leave the store.

But this could be avoided if the merchant gives me an option to save my cart.

We at WP Swings have built the perfect solution for WooCommerce store owners that lets your customers save the cart for later purchases. The Save Cart Later is a WooCommerce addon that allows both the guest & logged-in users to save their carts of favorite products for a specific period.

As a result, you get to optimize your cart page and reduce the WooCommerce cart abandonment rate. Not only this you can send a reminder email to your customers and recover the carts that might go abandoned.

How to add a save for later functionality to WooCommerce?

Actually, it’s a very simple and quick process and can be achieved in a few clicks, so here are the steps:

Step 1: Download and install the .zip file

The first step is to download the .zip file of the Save Cart Later from your WooCommerce account. Next, upload the file to your WordPress button and hit the Install button.

Step 2: Enable and configure the plugin

Once the plugin is installed and activated, enable the plugin to perform some important configurations.

These configurations include settings like:

1. Allowing guest users to save carts for later purchases.
2. Customize the save cart button.
3. Allow customers to move all their saved products back to the cart.

Step 3: Frontend representation

From the admin panel, you can customize the frontend representation on the cart page too.

We have got full documentation for this plugin, please feel free to check it out and learn about all the features of the plugin in-depth

7. Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Emails

Cart abandonment is a harsh reality in online selling. Once the cart is abandoned you need to have a spontaneous strategy to win back your lost prospects.

Reminding the customers of their incomplete checkouts is a great way to recover abandoned carts. To gauge the effectiveness of your emails send them at different intervals of time after the cart abandonment happens. As a result, you can select the time interval when most conversions happen.

According to a Barilliance study that the abandoned cart email recovery mail campaign should consist of 3 emails sent out at the following intervals:

• First email within an hour.
• Second email within 24 hours.
• Third email within 72 hours.

Just make sure that you collect the user emails early enough in the checkout process so that you can send an email reminder.

Win Back Your Lost Users Now!!!

Cart abandonments are something that needs immediate attention, or you’ll end up losing a hard-earned lead. While cart abandonment can be a big menace for your WooCommerce store, thanks to plugins like Abandoned Cart For WooCommerce that let you convert lost leads to successful customers in no time.

I hope you like this article. Also, do let me know in the comments how you find this automated solution to recover abandoned carts on your WooCommerce store.