What is checkout abandonment rate (CAR) and how is it affecting your company’s sales?

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  1. What is checkout abandonment rate (CAR) and how is it affecting your company’s sales?
  2. How do you measure it?
  3. What do you need to be doing to reduce checkout abandonment?
  4. The difference between mobile and desktop commerce and why it affects the CAR?
  5. What are some reasons why your mobile customers are not checking out on their mobile devices?

What is checkout abandonment rate (CAR) and how is it affecting your company’s sales?

First, let’s have a look at the definition of checkout abandonment…

‘The checkout abandonment rate is the percentage of customers that are leaving checkout after initiating the checkout process’ – Source: Dynamic Yield.

You may be wondering how exactly a retailer keeps track of the rate of checkout abandonment. Well, one can calculate this by dividing the number of successful purchases by the number of shopping baskets initially created by the customer. Once this is done, you can subtract the previous value from one and multiply that value by 100. 

And that’s how you calculate the percentage rate!

 How do you measure it?

But how do we measure Checkout Abandonment for our clients you may wonder? 

Well, let us show you! By using the program Google Analytics we can track a wide range of information from our clients’ websites, ad campaigns, and much more. Take a look at the screenshot below of the checkout abandonment rate for one of our clients:

All data for checkout abandonment can be found under the e-commerce tab under the subsection ‘checkout behaviour’. In the second screenshot (below you can see how google analytics gives us the data for how many new or returning visitors visited us on that particular day, the number of sessions, abandonment rate, and the ‘dropoff rate’ which helps us analyse the number of visitors that left a conversion process but did not proceed to make a purchase (create a conversion).

What do you need to be doing to reduce checkout abandonment?

Many aspects could be affecting the checkout abandonment rate of your e-commerce sales. Have a ponder over some of our top tips below and see if you could make any improvements in these areas..?

  1. Does your ad campaign include clear CTA’s  (call to action) – make sure your audience knows what’s in it for them if they make a purchase from you and do this with a sense of urgency. 

E.g – ‘Activate Xyznumber Today!’

  1. Provide a choice of payment options – by doing so your visitors can see that payment can be paid without any hassle. E.g – many have realised that pay later options such as Klarna and Clear have helped lower the checkout abandonment rate for their e-commerce sales.
  2. Be honest about the total price – Have you heard of the saying ‘Honesty is the best policy’  well this saying is just as valuable in this respect. Customers want a company to be upfront with the total cost of their product instead of adding a large sum as soon as you’re going to checkout for delivery charges. How can you avoid this..?

E.g – perhaps consider a shipping calculator that can determine the cost when a visitor enters their postcode.

  1. Give the option to save basket contents for later – this will higher the percentage rate of conversion if your customer is aware that their products will be there when they return to your site at a later time.

The difference between mobile and desktop commerce and why it affects the CAR?

Since mobile devices have smaller interfaces than desktop devices web developers adapt the companies website to limit the number of interruptions that may distract a customer from purchasing on the site. Not many brands/ companies have tackled this problem which leads to their Checkout Abandonment Rate being high as customers are coming in contact with too many interruptions such as glitches and perhaps leave to visit a competitor’s site instead. 

Whereas on a desktop device the checkout abandonment rate tends to be much lower due to the larger interface.

What are some reasons why your mobile customers are not checking out on their mobile devices?

  • Security doubts
  • Long checkout process
  • No option for guest checkout
  • Not a very mobile user-friendly website

Does this sound like your e-commerce site? If so, get in contact with us today and we would be happy to be of assistance to aid you with these issues!