Shopping cart abandonment refers to online shoppers who add items to their checkout carts on a particular ecommerce website but fail to follow through with the purchase.

The latest shopping cart abandonment rates show that 69 percent of all online shopping carts fail to make it to the checkout stage. In other words, nearly seven out of every ten online shopping baskets are ditched without the purchase process being completed.

Looking at data over the past year, the abandonment rate came in at the highest in Q1 2020 at 61.5 percent. In the two quarters that followed, it fell to 60 percent and 57.6 percent but has been slowly picking up ever since. 

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Reasons Behind Shopping Cart Abandonment

As an ecommerce store owner, it is important to understand why potential customers are abandoning their intended purchases and how to retarget these visitors. 

The most common reason for high abandonment rates is that people were put off by the high extra costs (be it shipping fees, taxes, or fees). Nearly half (49 percent) of online consumers gave up on their intended purchases because of this.

Other reasons include having to create an account to check out (24 percent), long delivery times (19 percent), and a complicated checkout process (18 percent).

To improve shopping cart abandonment rates for your ecommerce business, consider streamlining your checkout process. You could also offer popular payment methods and free shipping. These are some of the most recommended tactics to optimize and convert shopping cart additions.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate by Device

Before you start working on strategies to reduce your cart abandonment rate, you may also want to take into account the differences by devices.

At 85.65 percent, the average cart abandonment rate on mobile devices is significantly higher than those on desktop devices, which stands at 73.07 percent. 

The driving factors behind this large difference relate to the user experience. Consumers tend to find the online shopping experience on desktops more seamless. On mobile devices, on the other hand, difficulties such as trouble reading text and locating where to click on are a hindrance to checkout.

That said, if most of your store’s web traffic is coming from mobile devices, consider taking additional steps to optimize your customer’s mobile experience on your website to reduce those rates. Tactics include adding a sense of urgency such as a sale, being transparent with your charges, and recovering abandoned carts.

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