The best ways to boost WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery

Cart abandonment is a common occurrence in any online store. According to a study by Baymard, an institute conducting original large-scale research studies on all aspects of the e-commerce user experience, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.89%, which means nearly 7 out of 10 people shopping online will create cart abandonment on e-commerce stores.

Thus, generating solutions to this issue is a must for any eCommerce site to increase conversion rates. In this article, we will share with you the best ways to boost WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery.

What is an abandoned cart?

An abandoned cart occurs when a customer adds an item to their cart but exits the website without making a purchase. The number of items that are added to the shopping cart, then abandoned is called the cart abandonment rate.

Here are some main reasons for cart abandonment (generated by Baymard), you can dig into these reasons to optimize your store to reduce abandoned carts.

Below, we present some practical methods to handle this issue.

Top 10 tips for WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery

1. Make Shopping Cart Visible and Noticeable

The first solution to cart abandonment is to make carts visible and noticeable. It is proved that 24% of customers simply want to save items and abandon their shopping cart want for future consideration. So, if you wish them to come back and complete purchasing, you need to keep the cart noticeable. Otherwise, your customers may forget adding items to their shopping cart. To remind users of items they have saved, you can make the cart icon on the right corner bigger and catchier with the number of items inside the cart in outstanding color.

Most WooCommerce themes support this function for your online store; however, if there is no feature like this on your store, you can easily install and activate the WooCommerce Menu Cart plugin to your WooCommerce site.

2. Remind Users of Cart Items with Exit-Intent Popups

The second way to reduce cart abandonment rate is to create exit-intent popups appearing when a user intends to leave a website. Studies showed that 93% of online shoppers are encouraged to buy more products if free shipping is offered and 10% of online shoppers expect to get a discount on the product before buying.

Therefore, you can offer your customers a discount code, free shipping or an incentive via exit-intent popups which may encourage them to stay on your WooCommerce store longer and push them to make purchases right away. Furthermore, exit-intent popups are also a useful tool for you to build and increase lead email lists.

To create and deliver exit-intent popups, you can look through the section 4 of the guide to Get More Email Subscriptions for WooCommerce Store With Lead Magnet. It is really simple to have exit-intent popups work effectively in your store.

3. Be Transparent With Costs

The third solution to encourage customers not to leave an abandoned cart is to be transparent with all costs, especially hidden costs like shipping and tax. As you can see from the chart about reasons for cart abandonment I showed at the beginning of this article, the top reason making them leave your store without purchasing is the high extra costs including shipping cost and tax fees. Since these costs cause immediate annoyance and irritation and make them surprise and have the intention to compare it with other stores, resulting in a decrease in traffic and sales for your store.

To tackle this problem, you can show the shipping cost right away in the product description or on the pricing page instead of at the checkout page if you know the exact hidden cost. By doing this, you can prove your authenticity and trust in your customers which will encourage them to shop in your store despite the high shipping cost.

However, selling products with variable pricing as well as shipping cost as per the region, weight, etc, can make it difficult to estimate shipping cost. So, for better WooCommerce shipping management, you should install WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin by JEM to get its useful support for variable pricing and shipping cost calculations. This plugin comes with both free and pro versions; thus, you can consider choosing which one suitable for your store requirements.

This add-on allows you to set up shipping options based on different conditions or pricing models. It is very easy and simple to install and set up this plugin into your Woocommerce site. Just download the plugin to your computer and upload it to your site.

Then, you can start setting for this function.

Your customers are allowed to see shipping costs even for products with variable pricing before adding it to their cart.

Alternatively, you can build the shipping cost in your product price, and then offer free shipping to boost your conversions as well as your sales.

4. Enable Guest Checkout on WooCommerce without Account Creation

All customers expect convenience and want to shop quickly and get instant results. It is indicated that 22% of customers don’t want to complete their purchases when they are required to create an account because it forces customers to spend more time and effort just to buy products. Therefore, as a store owner, you should enable guest checkout instead of forcing shoppers, especially those who come to your store for the first time, to create an account before they can complete their order.

To enable guest checkout feature in WooCommerce, you can follow the steps below:

Step 1: Navigate to WooCommerce -> Settings -> Checkout in your Dashboard

Step 2: Then Tick Enable guest checkout to allow customers to buy the products they like without signing up.

Additionally, you can prevent customers from creating user accounts at all. To do this, in your dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts. Then, don’t tick in any section in Customer registration part to prevent customers from registering for your site. So you don’t need to provide a login page.

These ways will help to minimize the risk of customers leave your online store without finishing their purchases due to wasting time registering and logging in your site.

5. Shorten Checkout process

Long and confusing steps are the key factors affecting checkout process’s smooth, which can annoy customers and contribute to a poor experience, resulting in 28% of shoppers abandoning their carts. To tackle this issue, you can eliminate unnecessary fields in checkout to speed up the checkout process. The more you can simplify the process and reduce the number of steps a customer has to go through to checkout, the higher the chance they complete their purchases.

Depending on what you sell in your store, you may not need half of the default fields in the WooCommerce checkout. For example, if you sell downloadable products or digital downloads, you don’t need the shipping section, and can omit it out of your store.

To edit the default checkout page, you need to dive in code so you have to have certain knowledge about coding and programming. However, if you don’t want to touch in code, you can try another alternative solution which is Checkout Field Editor extension, providing you with an interface to add, edit, and remove default sections such as the billing and shipping shown on your WooCommerce checkout page. To use this plugin, you can start at $49.

6. Offer Multiple Payment Methods, including the popular & regional Payment Gateways

Payment methods are another key reason that causes clients to abandon their shopping carts. This is why conversion experts always recommend adding multiple payment methods such as Google Pay, and Apple Pay to reduce cart abandonment.

As clarified in the comparison between WooCommerce vs Shopify,
WooCommerce offers several payment gateways including Paypal and Stripe by default.

Besides, it supports almost all other popular payment services, even the regional and less popular ones, through plugins including free and premium ones. Hence, as a shop owner, you should integrate your store with as many payment gateways as possible to reach larger number customers, which may help to make your customers purchase your products more easily and reduce the abandonment rate.

However, each payment gateways have different fees and charges on transactions that you need to consider carefully before installing it into your WooCommerce site.

7. Make it Easy to contact & Ask Questions

The next reason for cart abandonment is the lack of information related to products and the store. Your customers may have questions regarding specific products, and if they cannot easily get acceptable answers, they will certainly leave.

To overcome this problem, you can install and activate Quick and Easy FAQs plugin which provides a quick and easy way to add FAQs using custom post type and then display those FAQs using shortcodes. It is really easy for you to add questions and answers with this plugin sine the FAQ editor looks similar to post editor.

Plus, to deal with the lack of information on your online store, LiveChat is a great additional solution. When there is no answer in the FAQs satisfying customers, they may want to ask the shop owners directly. If they cannot easily find a way to contact, they would abandon their shopping cart. In order to help customers contact you easily and conveniently, you need to set up a Live Chat feature in your WooCommerce store.

For that purpose, you can utilize the LiveChat plugin which allows customers to contact you directly from your WooCommerce website and address any questions instantly. By sending prompt replies, you can give customers the confidence needed to complete their purchases, resulting in
a considerable decrease in the cart abandonment rate.

8. Focus on Social media Retargeting

With a staggering 4.8 billion users worldwide, social media has become an omnipresent force, shaping the way individuals connect, share, and engage in the digital era. According to Statista, a Statistic Portal, people worldwide are spending 135 minutes per day on social media on average; therefore, it is great for shop owners to leverage social media to promote their brands. Among variety types of promotion strategies on social media platforms, social media remarketing lies in the top of the most effective solutions to the increase in sales and the decrease in cart abandonment.

Social media retargeting is all about blending original retargeting with retargeting based on user engagements like video views, reactions or event participation. The original retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple Javascript code or pixel to anonymously track your audiences who have visited your site and left without purchasing. Retargeting is an effective method to recover abandoned cart because it focuses you on those who are interest in or familiar with your brand.

There are 6 types of social media retargeting, namely Facebook & Instagram retargeting, Linkedin, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, and Pinterest retargeting. In which the most popular and effective type is Facebook & Instagram retargeting, because of its largest number of users.

To leverage Facebook and Instagram for retargeting, you need to create Custom audiences and dynamic ads.

First, you need to insert the Facebook pixel to track visitors and create custom audiences based on people who have visited your site. Then the website traffic data can be used to show the target audiences ads about the items they are interested in on your website.

To set up dynamic ads, you just need to upload your product catalog to Facebook or Instagram and set up the campaign once. It will work continuously to find the right people for each product and remind them of products they were interested in or the items they put into shopping cart but did not finish the purchase on your eCommerce site. When these customers click into the ads, they will immediately be driven back to your online store.

9. Effectively Use FOMO

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a psychological term, describes the anxiety about missing out on something on-trend. The fundamental goal of this tactic is to create a sense of urgency while giving shoppers the confidence that others are also making the same kind of purchase, which leaves on them the higher intention to buy those products and forces them to rapidly finish their purchases.

There are many ways to apply FOMO tactic to convert more sales as well as recover shopping abandoned carts for your store.

The first tip is to show a limited-time discount. It is proved that 48% of online shoppers will purchase a product if offered a limited-time discount. You can
create a sense of urgency for your discount offer by adding a countdown timer and remind customers to take the offer before time runs out if they like the products.

The second trick is to show scarcity by offering limited supply or limited incentives. By showing a certain number of items or incentives, you can force those who are interested in your products to purchase immediately, or they can’t get the incentives and make purchases later.

Therefore, as an online shop owner, you should utilize FOMO tactic to stimulate customers to buy your products and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. But don’t abuse it too often, or you’ll spoil the element of surprise and risk losing your credibility. Since customers will know if you are faking it. Hence, you need to understand your leads’ behavior to calculate the right timing.

10. Present Social Proof

One of the most crucial factors directly affecting the purchase decision of customers is trust, especially when they are considering buying an item from an unfamiliar online store. When a shopper lands on your site for the first time, they don’t know whether your products are good or bad. However, you can get their trust by adding various different types of social proof.

There are 2 main ways to leverage social proof to drive more sales and reduce cart abandonment for your store, namely displaying product reviews on your product page, and showing icons that indicate how many people have bought that specific product.

10.1. Display customer reviews

According to Local Consumer Review Survey of BrightLocal, a Citation submission team delivering high-quality citation campaigns, 88% of consumers trust online reviews and base on it to determine whether your online store is good or not.

Thus, you should reach out to your customers and ask them to leave nice reviews to post on your eCommerce site. For that purpose, you can install Yotpo plugin which will send an email to encourage customers to leave reviews after each sale completed, then display their reviews in an aesthetic and customizable format on your site.

10.2. Notify recent sales

Showing what other customers are buying on your site is also an ideal solution to convert more sales and cut down on the abandonment rate for your online shop. Because when visitors are aware that many other customers are buying from this brand, they will be more confident in making the first purchases.

To set up this feature on your store, you can install WooCommerce Live Sales Notification plugin, which will show beautiful recent sales popups to notify visitors of recently bought items on your WooCommerce site.

You can add a direct URL link so that if visitors are interested they can click on the recent sales popups to view details on the product page. Besides, you also can create custom “fake” notifications to promote any items as hot sellers.

11. Unique Checkout Links

Email a unique link to shoppers that don’t complete checkout. The email can take them exactly where they left off so they can complete checkout with the minimum of fuss.

If a shopper has filled the checkout form but didn’t complete it, the unique link will take them directly to a prefilled checkout page that includes all the data they entered. All they need to do is add any missing data and complete the purchase.

The CartFlows WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery function makes it easy. The easier you make the checkout process, the more likely a customer is to complete it. Less friction for the shopper, and more conversions for you!

Conclusion on how to boost WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery

Cart abandonment may be considered a natural phenomenon of most eCommerce sites because not all visitors coming to your site will make purchases. However, it is essential for you to find out several practical solutions and take some actions to reduce cart abandonment rates to improve conversions. Hopefully, this article would be a help for you to recover WooCommerce abandoned cart and boost sales.