Blog Post

5 Reasons Retailers are Plagued by Abandoned Carts

Learn why users are abandoning their shopping carts and how businesses can help prevent it from happening in the future.

It’s not always your fault. Across the eCommerce spectrum shoppers abandon most of their carts, ditching as often as 80% of the time. Mobile shoppers are especially fickle. As the retail world continues to shift into the hypercompetitive, omnichannel future where customers compare prices and offers even while shopping in your stores, some abandonment is unavoidable. Many of these transactions can be saved, though, and getting to the root cause is the key to turning shoppers into buyers.

Here are five common causes of shopping cart abandonment that can be diagnosed and addressed with digital performance analytics—if you know what to look for.

Complicated navigation, especially for mobile checkouts

Real-user measurement solutions can reveal points in your checkout process that stall conversion and make it easier to test your way past them, but even better, benchmarking mobile vs. desktop user behavior and identifying challenges unique to mobile device checkouts can lead to game-changing discoveries.

Slow page loads, long wait times

Some of the world’s most sophisticated retailers struggled to maintain site performance during peak periods over the holiday shopping season, and it cost them. Increasingly consumers won’t wait for a slow-loading page, often leaving mid-transaction to complete their purchases elsewhere. Synthetic testing can identify weak performance in your checkout process before your customers notice it.

Security concerns

When real-user measurement shows high abandonment at the payment phase, security concerns may be the reason. Shoppers are more aware than they used to be of issues like SSL certification and PCI compliance, and hesitance to trust you with credit cards may be overcome by highlighting your security standards during the checkout process.

Credit card processing delays

Carts abandoned because of a slow response from your credit card processor represent clear revenue loss. These customers were committed. Now they’re gone. Using synthetic monitoring to test every third-party call within your transaction process can flag these issues before they undermine your sales.

Coupon code failures

Another process in which synthetic monitoring can find and fix problems before they impact customers, coupon codes are a critical component of your buying experience. Knowing that they’re functioning properly, and also applying real user measurement to confirm that users aren’t abandoning at this stage, will ensure that you’re getting the results you need from your coupon codes.

To learn more about how retail and ecommerce brands are using digital performance analytics to track down and eliminate the root causes of shopping cart abandonment, download Catchpoint’s latest handbook: 5 Reasons Your Shopping Cart is Being Abandoned.

Real User Monitoring
SLA Management
Workforce Experience
eCommerce
This is some text inside of a div block.

You might also like

Blog post

The cost of inaction: A CIO’s primer on why investing in Internet Performance Monitoring can’t wait

Blog post

Mastering IPM: Key Takeaways from our Best Practices Series

Blog post

Mastering IPM: Protecting Revenue through SLA Monitoring