5 Negative Effects of Shopping Cart Abandonment

The negative effects of shopping cart abandonment are quite obvious: when you lose customers, you lose money. However, many small things quickly add up when the majority of potential customers leave without getting to checkout. Some are not always so obvious.

Unlike physical stores, online stores are plagued by cart abandonment, which leads to e-commerce businesses losing billions of dollars every year. In this article, we will discover the five not-so-obvious reasons why cart abandonment is something to care about.

What are the Effects of Shopping Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment indicates that shoppers visited your platform and became interested in your products or services but were not ready to buy. Sparks flew but didn’t turn into anything serious. This fling could transform into a mutually beneficial long-term relationship if you grant them a more comfortable, smooth, and stress-free shopping experience.

The latest research states that the average cart abandonment rate is 70.19%. More than half of shoppers simply leave the store without completing their purchase. You might assume the problem is grave, and you would be right. So why is shopping cart abandonment a problem for retailers? Here are five less obvious reasons why you should care.

1. Lost Customer Lifetime Value

If you think that the damaging effects of shopping cart abandonment stop with losing one sale, you are gravely mistaken. While the average order value reflects the income you lost in one cart, customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the profits you could have gained if the visitor had opted to become a loyal client. 

CLV doesn’t include just one customer. It also includes customers you could potentially get from the initial customer’s recommendations. So, by losing one customer, you potentially lose thousands of dollars of revenue.

Luckily, there are many methods for stopping this domino effect. One of the simplest yet most effective ones is an exit-intent pop-up, which can increase your conversion rates by roughly 20%. These smart widgets will only appear when your user moves their mouse cursor to close the tab, showing an intent to leave. An unexpected, enticing offer can sway customers and persuade them to stay.

Claspo is the prime choice for creating exit-intent pop-ups. You can quickly create widgets from scratch or find suitable templates already pre-configured for exit intent. Try Claspo for free now, create your first exit-intent widget, and keep those carts rolling! To optimize your strategy and find the best-converting widget, conduct A/B tests of different widget elements in our builder. 

We’ve prepared an A/B testing template to help you get started, and we’ll gladly share it with you. Spoiler: You can use it to validate any hypothesis, not just widget-related ones. 

2. Higher Customer Acquisition Costs

Cart abandonment can sabotage the work your sales and marketing departments put into retaining and attracting customers. They spend hours exploring promotion channels, experimenting with techniques to nurture leads, or brainstorming creative advertisement ideas, all in vain.

But it’s not just lost hours of your marketing team; you also directly lose money by employing retargeting tactics. Retargeting implies that you have an agreement with certain platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that they will use cookie files to display your company’s banners to your former visitors. This is a viable cart recovery strategy. Still, those ads are not free. If you want to get these customers back, you have to pay extra, leading to higher customer acquisition costs. But why would you let customers go so easily when you can use a pop-up from Claspo to persuade them to stay? It’s much easier to set up a simple widget than to bother with retargeting. 

Another factor is losing ad clickthrough rates because of abandoned carts. Every time someone adds an item to their cart, it is saved to their cookies and history, even if they don’t purchase anything. This is rather frustrating because ad platforms will use this data to target users like those who abandon their carts. As a result, your clickthrough rate and return on advertising spend (ROAS) will suffer.

3. Inventory System Overload

Any e-commerce store, regardless of size or stability, can feel the negative effects of shopping cart abandonment. In June 2020, TikTok users decided to “prank” then-President Trump. They visited his merch website, loaded carts with items worth millions of dollars, and then abandoned them.

“What’s the big deal?” we hear you imploring. “They’re virtual carts; just delete them — easy, peasy lemon squeezy.” Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it might appear at first glance. When somebody loads items into a cart and abandons them, the items stay temporarily reserved.

This can result in limited item availability for users, causing frustration and additional cart abandonment. As a result, you not only say farewell to the customers who decided not to buy, but you also lose the clients who were ready to place an order but could not.

4. Decreased Website Usability

In a world where you can order a pizza while taking a subway to get something to munch on when you get home, people are not willing to wait for your website to download. If it’s not running within seconds, they will take off to find an alternative.

Don’t trust us? Look at the stats! If your page loads in just 1 second, you will have three times higher conversion rates than if it did in 5 seconds and five times higher if it were 10 seconds.

Your mileage might differ, but the sentiment still stands: the faster your website loads, the better your odds are.

The negative effects of digital shopping cart abandonment can be acutely felt in terms of page load speed. When your site is flooded with full carts that do not transit to the next stage, load speed can slow to a crawl, leading to higher bounce rates.

Additionally, Google penalizes websites with poor optimization, leading to worse discoverability. So, not only will you lose more people because of load times, but fewer people will even see your page in the first place.

Claspo’s widgets are a two-fold solution to your problem. First, we’ve tested our widgets with Google PageSpeed Insights and confirmed that they do not affect page load speeds. Second, you can reduce the cart abandonment rate using our pop-ups, simultaneously increasing your conversion rates by up to 50% and resolving the indirect effects of this issue.

5. Incorrect Stats

All the previous points are pretty self-explanatory: cart abandonment big = problems bad, customers sad = conversion rates small and owner sad. But why is cart abandonment bad for statistics?

Cart abandonment rates are not always based on actual traffic. Sometimes, higher rates might be caused by bots or low-quality traffic that won’t convert. You should always be prepared for cyberattacks. The bot’s actions have no value in terms of assessing your performance or deducing customers’ behavioral patterns. 

However, bots still influence your traffic metrics. Did you think this product was visitors’ favorite? Wrong, they were not real people. Did you suspect that something was wrong with this page because users frequently quit the platform there? Wrong again, bots just happen to exit at the same time.

But it doesn’t end there — other metrics suffer as well. KPIs, lead metrics, campaign performance, and marketing KPIs all get hit with bots and low-quality traffic. This may lead to you making business decisions and creating strategies based on inaccurate data.

Calculating your cart abandonment isn’t a big deal in and of itself, but when bots get added to the equation, the difficulty rises exponentially. The only solution to this issue is robust cybersecurity, including bot-detection features. Only then can you achieve any semblance of accurate data.

Conclusion

As you can see, cart abandonment has many hidden adverse effects. Luckily, there are proven solutions to this issue, but Claspo is a quick and affordable one.

You can build your first widget in just a few minutes and reduce the cart abandonment rate with no extra time and effort. You can get started with Claspo for a nominal price of $FREE, making it an excellent choice if you’re on a budget or still not convinced by the power of pop-ups. You can use our built-in A/B testing features to try widget variations and see what works best for you.

Don’t worry about pop-ups being annoying — we’ve taken care of this. Claspo’s annoyance protection features will safeguard your viewers’ peace of mind while they browse. By default, our trigger section has a time interval between widget displays that prevents them from appearing simultaneously or overlapping each other.

Try Claspo today and defeat the bothersome cart abandonment!