Understanding and Combatting Shopping Cart Abandonment in E-commerce Marketplaces

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.

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.

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:

1. Structuring product names without irrelevant keywords.
2. Uploading attractive, high-quality product images especially the first image.
3. Providing detailed product information including the benefits, how to use the products, package contents and more.
4. Ensuring products are categorized correctly which drives into targeted traffic.

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.