When you are running an e-commerce store, inevitably you will experience shopping cart abandonment – customer adds items to their cart but leaves your site before checking out. In fact, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.63%.1 There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon. Customers experience unexpected costs at checkout, the checkout process is too complicated, found a better price elsewhere, etc.2 No matter what the reason, they all equal the same thing – lost sales. The good news is that you can use the abandoned carts report to identify the customers in question and try to win them back!
Where do I find this gem of a report, you ask?
Log in to your Magento admin. Click on Reports->Shopping Cart->Abandoned Carts
The report display will show you the following:
- Customer Name
- Number of Items
- Quantity of Items
- Subtotal
- Applied Coupon
- Created At
- Updated At
- IP Address
In this example you can see that “Bob Smith” has abandoned his cart. If we now visit Bob’s Customer record, we will see exactly what was in it when he left the site.
Click Customers->”Customer Name”->Shopping Cart
Now, what to do with all of this new found data?
There are few ways to approach your abandoned cart data.
1. Analyze the amount of abandoned carts your site is experiencing then take a look at where you can make improvements. Is the checkout process lengthy or complicated? Should you offer a wish list for convenient “saving” of items the customer is interested in? Is your site optimized for mobile devices?
2. Seize the opportunity to “remind” the customer that they have left something behind. Many successful online businesses use remarketing campaigns to bring the customer back to their cart and encourage the completion of the sale. Often times the emails will include an incentive in the form of a coupon or free shipping.
3. Use the product data to learn about trends in popularity. Are there certain products that are consistently left in carts? Are certain products most likely to be part of a completed sale following an abandoned cart email?
1- Baymard Institiute, https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
2- Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/232285/reasons-for-online-shopping-cart-abandonment/
