Understanding and Combatting Shopping Cart Abandonment in E-commerce Marketplaces in 2025
According to a recent study, the average rate of cart abandonment across all industries surpasses 70.19%. This statistic was derived from an analysis of 49 distinct studies that provided data on e-commerce shopping cart abandonment.
What is shopping cart abandonment exactly?
Shopping cart abandonment occurs when a buyer adds items to their online shopping basket but leaves the website or marketplace before completing the purchase. It is common in e-commerce and represents a missed opportunity for businesses to turn prospective customers into actual buyers.
As an example, consider this situation
A customer browses your online store, carefully selecting things, adding them to their cart, and proceeding to checkout. However, somewhere along the line, they decide to abandon their orders, leaving the cart filled but the transaction unfinished. This scenario is all too common among e-commerce businesses globally.
E-commerce sellers face shopping cart abandonment concerns regardless of where they sell. Whether it's on their own websites or major marketplaces like Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and others, the trend continues. The causes for abandoning may differ significantly based on the platform, but the core difficulties remain the same.
Reasons Behind Abandoned Carts In Marketplaces
Several factors contribute to shopping cart abandonment, ranging from logistical issues to psychological barriers:
No free shipping offer
Sellers do not offer free shipping on their websites or marketplaces when buyers meet minimum order requirements for free shipping, which can deter customers from completing their purchase.
Comparison shopping
Customers often use the cart as a temporary holding space to compare prices or products across different websites.
Poor platform performance
As sometimes, platforms also have their own maintenance schedule it can cause Slow loading times, technical issues, and platform errors can annoy customers and cause them to abandon their carts.
Distractions and interruptions
External factors such as a phone call, message, or loss of internet connection can disrupt the buying process.
Lack of trust or credibility
Buyers may abandon their carts if they don't trust the seller or store. Customer reviews, testimonials, and social proof can ease these fears and drive purchases. It is in human nature that if the store and product reviews are poor, customers might hesitate to proceed with the purchase.
Unattractive presented product listing
According to Vernette Ng, founder of The E-commerce University, one of the reasons buyers tend to abandon items is the poor presentation of product listings. This could be due to low-quality product images, vague and confusing descriptions, limited product details, or redundant listings in your stores, which can confuse buyers about which item to choose. Putting your product into the wrong categories may also target the wrong traffic.
The absence of promotional offers
Customers may abandon their carts if they feel they are not getting a good deal. The lack of promotional incentives can cause customers to abandon their carts.
Strategies to Combat Cart Abandonment In Marketplaces
Provide social proofs
Obtaining more positive reviews is crucial. Positive reviews serve as social proof of a product's quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction, thereby instilling trust and confidence in potential buyers. Providing excellent customer service is essential for fostering positive reviews, as they directly impact your store's reputation.
Re-engage with your customers
As you may be aware, both Shopee and Lazada offer their own Customer Engagement Management (CEM) tools - Shopee with its chat broadcast, and Lazada with its CEM feature tool. Make use of these CEM features to engage with customers who have abandoned their carts. By proactively reaching out to these customers, providing assistance, answering questions, and addressing concerns in real-time, you can personalize interactions and guide them through the checkout process. This approach ultimately increases the likelihood of completing the purchase.
Offer free shipping
Customers may need a minimum order to get free shipping. This may encourage shoppers to add more products to their baskets to qualify for free shipping. Free shipping may raise the average order value and seller revenue. While free shipping can help reduce cart abandonment, sellers must assess its financial impact, considering product margins, shipping costs, and order volume
Giving promotions or discounts
Offering promotions or discounts can be an effective tactic to combat shopping cart abandonment by providing incentives for customers to complete their purchases, creating urgency, enhancing perceived value, attracting price-sensitive customers, and encouraging repeat purchases. However, sellers must strategically plan promotions to align with business goals and maintain profitability.
Improve product listings
As advised by Vernette Ng here, to convert cart abandonments in your marketplaces into sales, you need to improve product listings by:
- Structuring product names without irrelevant keywords.
- Uploading attractive, high-quality product images especially the first image.
- Providing detailed product information including the benefits, how to use the products, package contents and more.
- Ensuring products are categorized correctly which drives into targeted traffic.
Improving product listings for over 100 SKUs can be daunting, especially when dealing with multiple marketplaces and duplicate listings for the same product under different names. How can you navigate this process without manual intervention?
With Sellercraft’s Product Listing (Product Grouping) feature, sellers can update their listings across marketplaces more quickly, ensuring consistency in product name, images, product code, and description. This streamlines your listings, enhancing visibility across multiple marketplaces and enabling products to be available through various channels, thereby accelerating sales opportunities. Consistent product information across all markets fosters trust among buyers and prevents confusion. Maintain consistency in titles, descriptions, prices, and inventory for clarity.
Example
Before using Sellercraft
With over 100 SKUs to handle on various marketplaces, your product listings are quite disorganized. The product names are filled with unnecessary keywords, the images are below standard, and the product information is not detailed enough. Potential customers are feeling uncertain and hesitant to buy. Product details that vary cause discrepancies in reports, posing challenges for sellers to predict accurately. Updating these listings manually can be overwhelming, time-consuming, and prone to mistakes. Without an efficient process in place, sellers find it challenging to maintain consistency across different platforms, which can limit their ability to take advantage of sales opportunities
After using Sellercraft
With Sellercraft's Product Listing (Product Grouping) feature, managing your listings has never been easier. You streamline product names effectively, optimize images to be more attractive, and offer detailed and enticing product information. By maintaining uniformity across various platforms, your products will gain more exposure, draw in specific audiences, and boost sales. Your listings inspire buyer confidence, resulting in fewer abandoned carts and higher conversion rates. Sellercraft helps you easily manage titles, descriptions, prices, and inventory to ensure smooth operations on all platforms.
The streamlined processes, optimized listings, and enhanced product information instill confidence in potential customers, leading to increased conversions and reduced errors. Sellercraft empowers sellers to take control of their online presence, paving the way for sustained growth and success in the competitive e-commerce landscape
Conclusion
Ultimately, the issue of shopping cart abandonment presents a major obstacle for e-commerce businesses, as the average abandonment rate surpasses 70.19%. It is crucial to understand the different elements that lead to abandonment, including shipping costs, comparison shopping, platform performance issues, and lack of trust, in order to create successful strategies to address it.
By incorporating strategies such as showcasing positive reviews, engaging with customers on a personal level, providing free shipping, and offering promotions or discounts, you can effectively reduce cart abandonment rates. Improving product listings through well-structured names, high-quality images, and detailed information is essential for attracting customer attention and building trust.
Sellercraft's Product Listing feature provides a seamless solution for overseeing listings on various platforms, maintaining consistency, and boosting visibility. Using tools such as Sellercraft enables businesses to enhance their online visibility, minimize mistakes, and boost conversions, leading to long-term growth and triumph in the competitive e-commerce industry.