Abandoned cart

Sara Heegaard March 3, 20222 minute read

Sara is a copywriter focused on lifting up Recharge's merchants, partners, and their customers. Before Recharge, her past lives included writing and editing at four different subscription... Full bio

What is shopping cart abandonment?

An abandoned cart is an online shopping cart that shoppers add items to, then exit the process before completing the purchase. When a site visitor adds products or services to their online cart, but neglects to check out, this constitutes shopping cart abandonment. Cart abandonment rate can be calculated by dividing a business’s total number of completed transactions by its total number of created shopping carts. Tracking cart abandonment rates can provide insight into problems with your sales funnel or checkout process. By optimizing the checkout process and reducing cart abandonment rate, ecommerce retailers can increase their conversion rates and revenue.

Why do customers abandon carts?

There are many possible causes for shopping cart abandonment, including unexpected shipping costs or shipping thresholds, a confusing return policy, a lack of coupon codes, a confusing checkout flow, and forced account creation to purchase. Depending on the cause of cart abandonment, creating options for guest checkout, being transparent about shipping costs and return policies, offering discount codes, and streamlining the checkout flow can all help prevent cart abandonment.

Abandoned cart recovery

One tactic ecommerce retailers can use to recover abandoned carts is through cart recovery emails. These follow-up emails give customers the option to complete their intended purchase, often providing a link to their cart with all the items they originally added to it. Here, it can be helpful to provide a discount code or free shipping to further incentivize these potential customers to complete their purchase.