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How Do Cart Abandonment Impacts E-Commerce and Travel Sites?

In Business
August 03, 2021
How Do Cart Abandonment Impacts E-Commerce And Travel Sites?

With the approaching Cyber Monday and Black Friday – when many people shop, travel, e-commerce, and other businesses are getting ready to announce great deals to attract customers. In the year 2018, Cyber Monday United States shopping saw a whopping sale of about $8 million, making the biggest online shopping day ever recorded for online retailers. 

As now the consumers are taking more online shopping, it has seen a rise in sales during the pandemic and holidays.

Sales, if going good, have always been positive news, but e-commerce retailers can also face issues that are caused by bad bots who take care of a certain volume every year. Damage that bot attacks are when the retailers get engaged in ‘denial of inventory’, in other words, ‘phantom carts’ or ‘cart abandonment’. 

Generally, it is something when bots program in a way where many items are added to shopping carts, which gets abandoned later. 

In the year 2018, all over the world, the rate of cart abandonment was 79.18% all over the industries, though it was acute particularly for airlines (recorded at 88%), financial sites close to 79%, and travel sites at 82%, and fashion and retails sites at 75%.

What to know about shopping cart abandonments?

Shopping cart abandonment means when any shopper visits a shopping website or app, adds one or more products, but leaves without purchasing the product. Items that are in the shopping cart, but are not purchased by the customer are considered as “abandoned”.

Shopping cart abandonment has nothing to do if the website is visible or not or any offer that comes up in the advertisement. So this issue cannot be solved by giving freebies. This needs to be addressed carefully why the users are going back from the website despite liking the products. 

89% of buyers who buy from the internet say that they have abandoned the shopping cart without any purchase. 

How to calculate the cart abandonment rate?

The rate can be monitored and calculated by the retailers to know what the reason is for the decrease/increase in revenue. This will let the retailers understand the purchase percentage showcased by the customers, who don’t get anything even with the products in the cart. 

The percentage can be calculated by dividing the total completed purchase by the total created shopping carts. To get the abandonment rate, whatever results come, subtract it by one and then multiply by 100. 

For many reasons, cart abandonment can have a bad impact on targeted businesses. Let’s get to know them. 

  • Reduced conversion rates

Car spike might let the business owners think that their current marketing strategies and pricing are not good enough, and this leads them to invest more efforts to increase their low conversion rate.

  • Non-availability of products

At the time of discounts, sales, and offers, the carts are loaded with desirable products right when the sales start. This leads to a reduction in inventory levels and the items get out of stock for genuine buyers. And instead, customers move to other websites for shopping, which leaves a great impact on sales of the target website. 

  • Reduced in ad CTR

Bots that fill up the shopping websites and search for the retail sites are also behind creating cookie trials which mislead ad networks and advertisers into showing the advertisements that humans are unable to see. 

The fake leads can waste a lot of your money which has been used otherwise on targeting a qualified audience. 

  • Revenue loss

Genuine customers who want to buy something will not be able to purchase anything as long as the bot continues to load up the shopping carts, which leads to a skewed ratio between the cost of acquiring customers and conversion rate through higher incentives and paid promotions.

  • Waste of effort and time

If the bot traffic will be heavy on shopping peak days, there will be the need for IT professionals where they would have to work and effort needs to be done to solve issues that are created by the bots.

  • Bad user experience

Bots loading up carts or scraping content at a high rate can put a strain on servers and the infrastructure associated with it, which will make the website work slow and irritate buyers who will move to a competitor’s website. 

  • Skewed website analytics

The skew site metrics have been visited by the bots significantly, which makes it difficult to know whether data that bots carry or real visitors are seen on on-site analytics dashboards. This will not only impact the statistics, but also the campaign performance, KPIs, marketing ROI, and lead metrics. 

How can shopping cart abandonment be reduced?

  •  Keep the checkout sweet and short

With so many websites offering shoppers with many choices than before, customers are more likely to shop from the ones with easier checkout options. The minute they find a lot of pop-up windows coming up and multiple confirmations have been asked, they will exit the website.

  • Use smartphones

Since various young populations use mobile phones to shop online, an attractive and streamlined mobile interface is crucial to get more online sales. If the interface will not be user-friendly, the abandonment rate will increase. 

  • Keep transparency

Most websites show some price on the product page and then it automatically increases at the time of checkout. This makes the shoppers confused. Make sure to be transparent about the product cost on the description page itself so that the abandonment rate doesn’t increase.

  • Returns

The benefit of e-commerce is its ability to offer doorstep exchange and return facilities. The policy should be stated clearly on the checkout page so that the shopper can be sure. Free returns will let the shopper buy without any doubt and worry. 

Start preparing in advance when the peak season arrives. Pay attention to unusual spikes that come up in traffic and make sure to have a dedicated team that monitors and analyses metrics in real-time. With better timely investments, capital, and effort you have made in your business, you would not be bothered by the bots and celebrate a holiday season instead.