8 Ways A Mobile App Can Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

In eCommerce, 7 out of 10 loaded carts end their journey as “just carts,” and only 3 successfully become a “purchase.” Each industry operating through online stores faces the problem of shopping cart abandonment, and merchants look for ways to reduce it.

The problem of cart abandonment is deeper than it seems, so before understanding the tricks to reduce cart abandonment, you need to understand its reason first. Most importantly, merchants often fail to figure out cart abandonment. Some merchants even do not understand the density of the problem.

We understand you – we understand your problem too. Therefore, we are trying to cover all your concerns and our solutions in a nutshell.

Table of Contents

• What Is Cart Abandonment?
• Cart Abandonment – A Direct Threat To Any Online Business
• What Can You Do To Avoid Cart Abandonment?
• Causes of Cart Abandonment
• Mobile Apps – The Best way to Reduce Cart Abandonment
• How Can Mobile Apps Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment
  • Dynamic Speed Loading To Combat The Lags
  • App-only Discount To Tempt Buyers With No Purchase Intention
  • Guest Log-In Options To Remove All The Complexities
  • Simple And Shortened Checkouts To Convince Buyers
  • Advanced Features For Relevant And Beyond Average Experience
  • Intuitive Designs To Remove The Stereotypical UX And UI
  • Appealing Push Notifications To Engage And Convince The Users
  • Power-Packed Security To Be Reliable And Win Buyers’ Trust
• What Else Can Merchants Do On Their End To Reduce Cart Abandonment?
• What Happens If Preventive Measures To Cart Abandonment Are Not Taken On Time?

What Is Cart Abandonment?

Even after being a common term in online business, not all are aware of its definition. Cart abandonment is when a buyer starts shopping with you and adds items to their cart but leaves without making purchases. In terms of marketing, cart abandonment is an intent for shopping that fails to reach the 4th stage of the conversion funnel. The conversion stages are awareness, interest, desire, and action (purchase).

In cart abandonment cases, a purchase intent drives the users to add products to the cart. But, some barriers refrain them from purchasing. From a business perspective, cart abandonment is tallied as a rate, and the higher the rate, the more risk your business has.

How to Calculate Cart Abandonment Rate? 
1 – (Transaction finished/ Transaction started)*100

Even though cart abandonment is a part of online business, the aim of the merchants should be to minimize it. Once the cart abandonment rate reaches 90% or higher, it will be too difficult to recover.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics

Cart Abandonment – A Direct Threat To Any Online Business

So, as we said before, cart abandonment is a part of an online business that will never disappear. Now, a merchant needs to pay attention to shopping cart abandonment and take steps to minimize it. Unless they update the business strategies, cart abandonment will disrupt its progress.

Source: Statista

In the picture above, Statista shows the cart abandonment rate in different industries. So, you can see that not a single industry can stay out of the impacts of cart abandonment.

So, What Can You Do To Reduce Cart Abandonment?

If you are conducting online business, you first need to find out the percentage of cart abandonment.

So, we will begin by searching for the possible reasons for cart abandonment – dive into the next section and find it out.

Each Abandoned Cart Has A Reason – Let’s Find It Out To Reduce It

As per the findings from different surveys, most customers denote the following reasons for abandoning their carts.

1. Hidden Costs – Incorrect Discount Code

Extra charges (shipping cost, handling charge, fast delivery charge, etc.) come up during the checkout process. If a discount coupon does not work, buyers can abandon their cart as the cost of the product increases.

2. No Buying Intention At All

Buyers were only looking for the products, not wanting to purchase them. Hence, they just came on the app, added a few items to the cart and left without purchasing.

3. Average UX/UI

Old-fashioned and unsatisfactory UX/UI made the users feel that the products/services would not be up to their expectations. The lack of classy themes and cool colour schemes will make the buyers drop their purchase intent.

4. Laggy Browsing

Pages that take more than 3 seconds to load can give the buyers an impression of averageness. Buyers simply do not like to wait – so the slow-loading apps will have a higher number of cart abandonment.

5. Lengthy Checkouts

Unnecessary form filling, twice or thrice asking for confirmation during checkouts, makes the customers abandon their carts. Buyers are ready to browse the products for hours, but they need the checkout process superfast. So, the apps that do not save users’ information have cart abandonment.

6. No Relevant Features

The features available on the online store are not meeting the buyers’ expectations. Consumers have a mindset to get the features like premium apps they used earlier. So the lack of premium features will give a below-average impression of your app, and they will abandon their cart.

7. Security and Privacy Issues

Buyers can abandon their carts if they have privacy and security issues while browsing. If they feel the app is unsafe – be it with payment or privacy- they will abandon their carts and are less likely to return.

8. Re-entering Card/Bank Details

Sometimes, an app does not save the buyers’ card or bank details when they enter these details for the first time. So, on their next purchase, buyers have to enter all these again, which disgusts them, and they drop the purchase.

Well, we talked enough about the problems and concerns, but we are not here to threaten you with these. Instead, we are here to offer you solutions. So, let’s go to the solutions right here.

Mobile Apps – The Best way to Reduce Cart Abandonment

The merchants can resolve cart abandonment’s first major cause (hidden costs), and the rest of the problems can be resolved by mobile apps. Explore how:

How Can Mobile Apps Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment And Rescue Your Business?

Mobile apps with their cool features can attempt to minimize shopping cart abandonment – read the following sections for more details.

1. Dynamic Speed Loading To Combat The Lags

Users want lightning speed while shopping – be it browsing the products or jumping to another page, speed matters a lot. Mobile apps understand this and bring the power of the latest APIs and single APIs to offer faster performance.

57% of Shoppers abandon if the wait time is 3 seconds to load a page, and 80% of them will never return, no matter how merchants try to retarget them. 

2. App-only Discount To Tempt Buyers With No Purchase Intention

Let’s take a moment to admit that buyers are attracted to the free offers and discounts. By using a mobile app, merchants can bring the users back who never intended to purchase. To tempt your target buyers, even if they came just to explore the products, you could use these offers. Mobile apps will help you to add something more to your offer. App-only discount will be an additional offer to the discount offers you are providing, so avail these now.

3. Guest Log-In Options To Remove All The Complexities

Any kind of complexities during online shopping can also cause cart abandonment. Mobile apps are aware of this, and mobile apps now come with guest log-in options.

Did you know? Forceful account creation is the reason behind 34% of cart abandonment.

The guest log-in option enables the buyers to continue their actions on the apps without creating an account with the merchants. As a result, buyers can even transact without creating an account with you.

4. Simple And Shortened Checkouts To Convince Buyers

Lengthy and complicated checkouts are major reasons behind cart abandonment. Mobile apps take action against it by introducing 1-2 step checkouts. Mobile apps aim at cutting out unnecessary steps during checkouts. It is said that the correct checkout optimization strategies can increase conversions by 35.62%. So, would you like to try this out with mobile apps for decreasing your eCommerce cart abandonment?

Amazing fact:

In the retail industry, simple checkouts reduced 20% to 60% of cart abandonments. 

5. Advanced Features For Relevant And Beyond Average Experience

Shoppers come with different shopping needs – premium user experience is a prime need here. Buyers often don’t find relevant features, so they abandon their carts. With mobile apps, you can satisfy your buyers with their cool features. These include AR, VR, image search, voice search, gamification, live chat, exit popups, multi-currency and payment, save for later options, and many others.

6. Intuitive Designs To Remove The Stereotypical UX And UI

The theme, layouts, color schemes, etc., of mobile apps, help the merchants get rid of average-looking graphics. Responsive designs are the key to convince buyers to re-look at their abandoned cart and think of a purchase. So, use mobile apps and attempt to impress your lost shoppers.

7. Appealing Push Notifications To Engage And Convince The Users

If you need to reduce cart abandonment by offering rewards/discounts to your customers, you need to ensure that they are seeing your offers. However, the majority of the notifications are unseen at present. So, what is the way out?

Mobile apps bring a premium solution to this – Now, you can enhance the chances of getting viewed with AI-powered push notifications via mobile apps. These notifications are based on the past actions of the buyers – so you can stay relevant. Also, you can even send scheduled push notifications and create a sense of urgency among your buyers. For example, you can send discounts (price drop alert/special prices), offers (sale ends in/only a few are left), promos, free samples, and reminders (added products to the cart are getting sold) to the users, that too in the convenient times of your buyers.

Do you know that sense of urgency can bring back lost customers and sometimes lead to purchases? 

8. Power-Packed Security To Be Reliable And Win Buyers’ Trust

Mobile apps come with compact data protection, SSL certifications,  PCI compliance, payment safety, and much more. Therefore, the buyers will refrain from cart abandonment due to security issues.

Check out: Benefits of Shopify Mobile Apps – See What Your Business is Missing Out Without an App

The Bonus Of Mobile Apps That Can Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

You may be interested in 25 KPIs That Measure Performance, Success, And Growth Of Shopify Mobile Apps

What Else Can Merchants Do On Their End To Reduce Cart Abandonment?

Well, that’s all about the service and benefits you can get from a mobile app, but is that all? No, merchants, too, need to take a few actions like:

1. Eliminate Extra Costs

Transparent pricing has the potential to satisfy your buyers and convince them to make a purchase even after abandoning their cart. Therefore, it will readily reduce the cart abandonment rate by building a trust factor among your buyers.

2. Flexible Return And Exchange

Lastly, flexible return policies, like allowing return placements after 15-30 days instead of 5-7 days of delivery, can help you in decreasing shopping cart abandonment.

3. Fast Refund

Also, a fast and easy refund system can serve you here. For example, a refund in 24 hours and a refund in the source account instead of any wallet will be very helpful.

Find out: A Complete Guide To Turn Your Shopify Store Into A Mobile App

4. Survey And Retarget Buyers

Survey to know the causes of cart abandonment. On the next step, you can use direct calls, SMS, email, newsletters, ad campaigns, social media marketing, influencer, and content marketing, to retarget these buyers.

Check out: How Are Shopify Mobile Apps Transforming The eCommerce Landscape?

What Happens If Preventive Measures To Cart Abandonment Are Not Taken On Time?

Your business can come across some ever-lasting damage because of not taking on-time preventive measures to cart abandonment. So, the concern is, yes, even a single cart abandonment takes time to recover.

So, you have to strategize your business with mobile apps to reduce shopping cart abandonment and avoid its deadly impacts.

Read the Success Story of AmorEarth after using MageNative Shopify Mobile App

Winding up

In a nutshell, shopping cart abandonment has always been there and will stay in eCommerce, but merchants need to reduce it. Minimizing the cart abandonment rate is not something that brings instant results; it will take time instead. So, you will have to be patient. Also, the same trick will work to recover all the cart abandonments. Therefore, you need to take the help of mobile apps along with improving product quality, pricing, and marketing strategy.