Have a large number of cart abandonments and don’t know why this is happening? Although there are solutions to recover abandoned carts, there is a way that we at CartBoss figured out to optimize your checkout experience to lower the percentage of abandoned carts and save money on solutions for recovering abandoned carts!
There are various solutions available to check the user behavior on numerous subpages of the store (in this specific case, the checkout page) like Hotjar. These solutions are highly beneficial for any Ecommerce business and give great insight into user behavior. With solutions like Hotjar, you can see how the website visitors behave on the website, what they click on, how low on the website they scrolled,… These types of tools are a must-have for any successful online store.
At CartBoss, we are constantly doing various research and collaborating with large E-commerce companies to optimize our solution for recovering abandoned carts with text messages. One thing that stood out to us was that even though we had a large statistical pool of users on the checkout page that abandoned the site, they abandoned it on different parts of the site, and mostly a lot of their personal information/checkout form already completed.
According to research, 70% of online visitors abandon the checkout page after filling out most of the billing information. Only after that do they leave the site. This statistic was also confirmed by a few E-commerce companies that we collaborate with.
There must be a reason why this happens. Hence, we focused on this specific fact and tried to find a reason for it and a good solution – not only by sending text messages to recover those abandoned carts but to optimize the marketing costs as best as possible.
Reasons why people abandon your checkout
We have already written several different articles on why users abandon their carts. Still, in this one, we focus on those who have already entered all their information in the billing form.
Based on our research, these visitors scroll through the complete checkout page. They usually scroll to the bottom of the pace and go back to the top and do this action a few times. These customers are not distracted by other outside reasons but are considering if they are prepared to complete their order based on the information given on the checkout page. And there are only two things usually that are important: the delivery and the payment.
The delivery can affect the potential customer if it takes too long or if there are any additional costs.
The payment methods can affect the potential customer if there isn’t the right one available or if it changes the final cost.
Additionally, there could be other hidden costs related to the final order like taxes, but none of these E-Commerce sites had that, making this option irrelevant.
So, how to test optimizing the checkout process with text messages?
Testing checkout conversions with text messages
There were only two reasons besides a random distraction from the outside world; the solution was to send different text messages with different offers. One included free, fast shipping, the other one free cash on delivery, and the last one a percentage discount.
This way, we could see the main reason for the visitors to abandon their checkout process or, better yet, see what made them convert after receiving the abandoned cart text message.
The testing was done on more than 50 different online shops, and the point was not to find the ultimate answer as they all had different prices, dates and options for shipping dates and payment methods. The goal of this test was to see if we could find the reason for high abandoned cart rates via CartBoss text messages and fix them.
The tests were done in a time span of one month, sending only two text messages – offering free shipping and offering free cash on delivery. Based on the results, the companies implemented the changes on their sites. Some offered a lower price for the delivery, and others changed the price for the cash-on-delivery payment option.
After that, these companies activated only the text messages to first send just a gentle reminder that the visitors who abandoned their carts received a gentle reminder about their abandoned cart and then that the stock is running out and that they should complete their order.
But in this specific research, we did not focus on the results of the sent text messages. We wanted to know if, based on the previous results regarding the price of delivery and price of payment methods, you can decrease the abandoned cart percentage.
After one month of gathering information on the checkout pages with the changed offers, the results were gathered to see if there was any change in the conversion rate.
The percentage of abandoned carts dropped on average by around 8%, which was significant for all of the companies in this research. This meant that they found a simple solution to increase their initial marketing spend and not have to use solutions for recovering abandoned carts. Furthermore, they now had a simple solution to start testing additional ways to optimize their checkout conversion rate without the need to make any changes to their websites.
Increasing your conversions
Lowering marketing costs is becoming more and more important as the results from marketing campaigns are always lowering – the reach of ads is getting worse, and there is more and more competition. Optimizing marketing costs is crucial to get the edge over your competitors and grow as a company. The best way to optimize marketing costs is to convert as many first-time online visitors as possible without using remarketing tactics.
Realizing this is why these companies decided to collaborate with us and be part of this research. Using solutions for recovering abandoned carts is a crucial part of any E-Commerce business but preventing them in the first place is even better.
That being said, CartBoss offers you one of the best ways to start testing and finding out the reasons why your visitors abandon their carts. And, with all the options CartBoss has available, after optimizing your checkout, CartBoss will continue recovering the visitors that still abandon your checkout!
