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Shopify abandoned cart recovery with text messages – the problems and the solution

When your online customers want to complete their order, they go to the checkout page, enter their information, select between the delivery options and choose their payment method.

In a perfect world, everyone would complete their order once they get to the checkout page. But that’s not the case. Around 70% of visitors who get to the checkout page leave it without completing their order.

No matter the eCommerce platform of choice, WooCommerce, Shopify, Squarespace,… abandoning carts is a regular occurrence.

Many changes have been made to the checkout page to optimize conversions. Removing as many information fields as possible, automatically completing the delivery location, giving the option to complete the order as a guest, and many more.

What can you do to recover that 70% of customers who added products to their cart went to the checkout page but did not complete their order?

Recovering abandoned carts uses different remarketing digital channels like social media, email, and text messages. The goal is to persuade customers to complete their order – usually, it is done by offering a special offer via some remarketing channels.

In recent years, recovering abandoned carts with text messages has become the go-to solution as it offers results that can not be done with traditional remarketing channels like emails. More about the results and how to even implement text messages in your Shopify store will be described later in this article.

What makes a person abandon their cart

Before we tackle the solution, let’s see what the main reasons for cart abandonment in Shopify stores are.

There are four main reasons why somebody abandons their cart:

  1. Hidden costs
  2. Missing payment methods
  3. Slow shipping
  4. Random distraction

Hidden costs are costs the customer did not foresee before buying the product on your store. An example of hidden costs would be extra shipping fees, additional payment option fees, or even taxes. Sometimes these fees can go as high as 20% of the product price, which can drastically increase the abandonment rate on the checkout.

Missing payment methods are pretty self-explanatory – if the payment method with which your customer can pay is not available, he has no other option but to leave the site. The only option would be for them to write to the support team and ask if there is any other way of transferring the money.

The same is with shipping/delivery options – your customers want to get the ordered product as fast as possible, and waiting too long for it to arrive increases the chances of them not completing the order. In some cases, if the store offers the cash-on delivery option, they do not even pay for the ordered product, and thus the store loses money due to delivery costs.

One of the most overlooked reasons for cart abandonment is because your customers just get distracted by something from the outside world – either somebody calls them, they hear something interesting on the TV, they get visitors,… The possibilities are endless.

So, how can you get your visitors to get back to the website and complete their orders?

A few options like social media retargeting and sending abandoned cart emails have been used for quite some time now. Still, they have not generated results even close to what text messages have to offer for your Shopify store!

The old way of recovering abandoned carts

The most popular way of recovering abandoned carts so far has been with the help of emails. When a visitor abandons their cart on your Shopify store, they receive a few emails in a span of a few days offering them a special offer or a discount so that they complete their order.

Using emails for recovering abandoned carts is not very successful as emails have an open rate of under 20% and a click-through rate of around 3%.

The main reasons for such low numbers are that many emails go into the “Promotions” tab ,Spam folder or are not even opened as many people check their emails only occasionally. Actually, on average, emails are checked 15 times per daydid you know that phones are checked more than 250 times a day?

The new solution taking on the E-commerce world is using text messages to replace emails for recovering abandoned carts!

The NEW way of recovering abandoned carts

Using text messages instead of emails to recover abandoned carts has incredible benefits. To give you a better understanding – 93% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of receiving them!

This means that when somebody abandons their cart on your Shopify store, you can automatically send them a text message with a special offer – or just a gentle reminder (because you never know if they abandoned the cart due to a random distraction) to give them the incentive to complete their order.

No other marketing channel has such excellent results as text messages have. Even more – the demographics that reads and uses text messages is a lot broader than with emails – elderly and less tech-savvy people tend to not open emails often but are well experienced with text messages.

And there is one more important benefit with text messages – besides not going into the spam or promotions tab – they are short. The length of the text messages is beneficial as nobody likes to read long texts. With text messages, you see the special offer in just a few lines of text. You can not miss it!

These fantastic reasons why text messages are so successful generate incredible results! CartBoss, a solution for recovering abandoned carts with text messages, has shared their statistics with us to see what text messages can bring to your Shopify store.

The open rate of text messages is 99% – almost every text message gets opened! But that is not as interesting as the click-through rate.

On average, the click-through rate for text messages is between 30 and 40%. Some stores can have even higher results – even as high as 70%, but it depends on the type of products offered in the store.

CartBoss even shared the average return of investment (ROI) – the ratio between the value of the recovered cart and the price for the sent text messages. The overall average ROI is around 2400%, with some stores getting as high as 5000%+!

Text messages are cheap and give you amazing and instant results. The only obstacle, till now, was how to implement them in your Shopify store and start using them as simple as possible.

Integrating text messages in your Shopify store can be a tricky process as everything needs to seamlessly work together. From various redirects, supporting multiple different stores, automatically adding special offers to the recipient’s cart, different recipient languages, sending them only at appropriate hours, and stopping sending them after the purchase has been completed,… There are so many aspects to using text messages to recover abandoned carts that it might sound overwhelming.

Well, this is where CartBoss comes in!

CartBoss is a Plug&Play solution for Shopify stores to recover abandoned carts with text messages, and it is the perfect solution with which you can start scaling your store in a matter of minutes.

CartBoss – the simplest solution for recovering abandoned carts with text messages

Implementing text messages in your Shopify store with CartBoss is a simple 2-minute process – you install their Shopify app, connect it with your CartBoss account via the API key, and you are done. That is it! CartBoss works entirely on autopilot, so you just set it up and forget about it!

The text messages for recovering abandoned carts are already prepared and translated – although you can always write your custom text messages. The recipient’s language is automatically detected, so they always receive them in their language. No settings are needed as this is all done by CartBoss.

There is one feature that is worth mentioning! Automatic checkout field population with the recipient’s information. When a recipient of the abandoned cart recovery message clicks on the link, they are redirected to the checkout page. And this page is already filled with their information. All they need to do is click on the button “Complete order.” This is a fantastic feature that only CartBoss offers and is one of the main reasons for its success!

Special offers are also embedded in the links within their text messages – once the recipient clicks on the link, the coupon code is generated on the Shopify store and automatically applied to the cart. This means that there is no need to generate coupon codes on your own – they are generated by CartBoss – and also deleted after a while.

There are a lot of other benefits CartBoss has to offer out of the box – do-not-disturb mode, UTM tracking, link shortening,… Not only that, but they also support Post-Purchase text messages.

As you might have noticed, we are excited with what CartBoss offers for Shopify store owners with its text messaging solution, which works entirely on autopilot.

When to send abandoned cart text messages

Getting in contact with your customers as fast as possible after they have abandoned their cart is one of the most important aspects of increasing your chances of converting them from visitors interested in your products to customers. The more time goes on, the more they forget about your website, your product, and the reason why they wanted to buy the product in the first place.

Most shoppers, especially impulsive ones, do not even know on what site they were checking the product they were interested in. This is not so much the case for well-established brands, but it still does have an important impact on conversions. When buyers are interested in the product due to an ad they saw online, which made them think of buying the product, it is important to get in touch with them as soon as possible. This way, you increase the chances of converting them.

Although it greatly depends on the type of online shop you own and what kind of products are being sold on the site, the overall best number of abandoned cart text messages to be sent is between 1 and 3. More than that is usually not effective.

The main reason is that when offering special offers to your visitors who have abandoned their cart, if one or two offers do not make them convert, nothing will. The recipients of the messages have surely seen them, so there is no point in sending them more offers if nothing helps with the sale.

The first text message for recovering abandoned carts should be sent as soon as possible. The time frame we at CartBoss found was the best performing was between 5 and 15 minutes after the cart had been abandoned. These messages have a CTR of around 37% and a ROI of more than 2700% (with some online shops, this number is even double or triple).

The second abandoned cart text message should be sent a few hours after they have abandoned their cart. They are usually sent after 3 to 6 hours. These messages have the same CTR as the first message – around 37%. But their ROI is lower due to the offer included in the message, making the average order value smaller.

The third message is usually sent a day after the cart has been abandoned. Just like with the second text message, the ROI is a bit lower as these messages include a special offer, usually a discount. With the third abandoned cart text message, the CTR drops by a few percent as some recipients are already familiar with your offer and are not interested anymore.

As mentioned, the time delays that are optimal for any site can vary, and testing out different time delays is important. Also, it is wise to consider that sending too many text messages for recovering abandoned carts can be annoying to recipients if they are sent in a short period.

That being said, most recipients (more than 70%) enjoy receiving them and never decide to unsubscribe from them. So don’t worry about sending too many of them; just keep them well scheduled in a one-day span.

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