The Ultimate Guide to Recovering Abandoned Carts on Your Shopify Store in 2024

Want to know how to recover more abandoned carts for your Shopify store? If so, this article is for you.

Abandoned carts can be one of the most frustrating parts of running an ecommerce store. It's painful to think you did everything right to get someone to your store, get them hooked enough to add a product to their cart, just to lose them at the last hurdle.

On average, 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That's a lot of opportunity to grow your revenue; and there are a lot of things you can do to recapture these carts. Read on to find out.

Why Do Customers Abandon Carts?

To understand how to recover abandoned carts, you must first understand why customers abandon carts. Looking at the data shows a few trends. 

Here's the formula to calculate your store’s cart abandonment rate:

(Completed checkouts / Number of carts created) * 100 = Cart abandonment rate.

As we mentioned, the average cart abandonment rate is around 70%. According to the Baymard Institute, here are the most common reasons given by shoppers they surveyed for why they left their cart without finishing their purchase:

Additionally, 58.6% of customers said they were “just browsing” or “not ready to buy." Not much can be done about this cohort. However, the other reasons above do have solutions. Better yet, they can be tackled quickly.

Let’s break it down further and examine these reasons for abandoned carts, and some tips to prevent (and thus reduce) cart abandonment.

Extra costs

Remember, customers don’t like surprises at checkout. Offer free shipping or make any shipping charges clear on product pages. You can’t control taxes but remember to indicate any added taxes early in the checkout process.

Requiring an account or a complicated checkout process

Mandating your shoppers create an account before they can checkout is an extra hurdle many won’t bother with. They may not only abandon their cart but never return as customers and tell their friends to stay away, which is even worse.

Therefore, always ensure guest checkout is possible. You’ll get more sales and happier customers that way, too. You can always offer the option to make an account; just don’t require it.

Slow delivery

Do what you can to provide fast and reliable delivery. Consider switching delivery partners, and offer multiple delivery options if you can.

If you really can't improve shipping time at all, at least be clear and open with how long shipping will take.

Did not trust your site with credit card info

Trust is hard won and easily lost in the ecommerce world. It can lead to both abandoned attempts and discontinuation of repeat business. However, abandoned carts in Shopify due to distrust of your site are simple to avoid. 

Always make sure your badges from approved payment methods are clearly part of your checkout process. Keep your security certificates up to date and your website free of spam, intrusive advertising, and other things that may make customers think you’re not to be trusted.

Couldn’t calculate total cost upfront

This ties in again with shipping charges and another factor. If a customer adds multiple items to their cart, ensure that the total cost of everything is easily visible. Furthermore, ensure that the total shipping cost is clear.

If things will ship separately, indicate that upfront. Additionally, if discount codes are available, clearly show how much they reduce the total order cost.

Unsatisfactory returns process

A major stumbling block in online shopping is that shoppers cannot physically see and examine products before purchasing. So, they rely on easy returns to compensate. If you make returning items complicated, expensive, or complex, shoppers may abandon their entire cart.

That’s why it pays to make returns easy. If you can, cover return shipping costs for your customers. Furthermore, clearly spell out your returns policy on your website and include a link on product pages. 

Crashes or errors

Getting into the zone while online shopping is fun, but nothing brings that to a halt faster than a crash or erroring out. Customers may reconsider their entire cart and leave it behind if this happens. You want to capture shoppers when they have the energy to hit “buy now,” after all.

So, keep your e-commerce store up to date and squash bugs as they crop up. Don’t put off a repair if it will cost you some cash, either. It’s an even more significant loss to lose countless sales because you didn’t fix something earlier.

Not enough payment methods

Supporting as many credit cards, payment platforms, and e-transfer services as possible will lead to more completed purchases. Even if you cannot support everything, offer as many as you can.

Offering payment methods that support multiple options themselves can also be helpful. For example, PayPal allows people to link multiple cards and banks to their accounts without worrying about the specifics. If you can support services like Venmo, that will make it even easier for people to complete their purchases.

Card declined

Relatedly, you want to support multiple payment methods because declined cards drive abandoned carts. If a shopper’s card declines offer the option to use another payment method right away. You may not be able to do anything about declined cards directly, but at least you are offering the chance to complete the sale.

Always include social proof

This is not so much a recovery technique as it is a good practice for everything mentioned above. Reviews of products and your store help customers build trust and feel confident they will like what they buy.

They can help reduce returns, make it clear that your payment process is secure, and that the products you offer are worth what you are charging.

Recovering Abandoned Carts: Top Tips for Shopify Store Owners

So far, we have covered how to prevent abandoned carts, but what can you do to potentially recoup already abandoned carts? There are many ways to do this, but we’ll cover some of the most effective below.

Catch them at the door with exit intent popups

Having code on your website that notices if a customer has clicked off or is going to exit your store lets you prompt them with a brief message before they do. Use this to remind them they have left items in their cart.

Even better, you can then offer a nominal discount, say 15% to 25% off. Or, prompt them to sign up for a mailing list with their email before they go—just don’t make that a requirement to leave your page.

Send emails

The importance of abandoned cart emails cannot be overstated. This is your chance to remind a shopper they have left products behind.

You may need multiple emails to recapture these carts. Try the following email sequence if a customer abandons their cart:

1. A few hours after they leave
2. An email with discounts or other offers around 24 hours later
3. An email that prompts urgency around 48 hours later (low stock, one-time offer, etc.)
4. A last-chance offer around a week or so later

Retainful says this strategy can recoup 10% to 20% of otherwise abandoned carts. Considering the low cost of email marketing, even recapturing a very small number of otherwise abandoned carts is worth it.

Create an app and send push notifications

Emails are great, but the best way to re-engage customers with abandoned carts is through push notifications from a mobile app.

All top ecommerce brands today have their own app. A mobile app lets you offer a better mobile user experience (which will reduce abandoned carts on its own), as well as giving you full access to the power of native push notifications.

Push notifications are cheaper and more effective than email and SMS, more personal and more direct, which makes them perfect for abandoned cart notifications.

If you don't have an app and think building one is out of the scope of your expertise/budget, check out MobiLoud.

MobiLoud converts your site into mobile apps, retaining all the features of your website, with no coding and virtually no effort required.

It's the favorite app development method of high-revenue ecommerce brands such as Tobi, rue21, Jack & Jones and Rainbow Shops, and is the easiest way to unlock push notifications for your business.

Want to learn more about how MobiLoud can convert your store into an app in less than a month, for a minimal cost? Book a free consultation now.

Use retargeting ads

You can collect lots of information from customers who visit your store using cookies. But what can you do with it? One thing you can try to recover abandoned Shopify carts is by using retargeting ads.

If a customer abandons a cart, a targeted ad reminding them it exists on another website may encourage them to return and finish their purchase. Consider including an exclusive discount or offer to sweeten the deal as part of the personalization process.

Offer live chat support

As we covered in the section above regarding reasons why customers abandon their Shopify carts, a complicated checkout process is a significant driver of abandoned carts. To help smooth this over, you can offer live chat support.

A prompt like “How may I help you today?” or “Need any help?” could capture a confused customer who may otherwise drop their entire attempt. Remember to keep this unobtrusive and easy to close, too. It may annoy customers who know what they are doing otherwise. 

Make sure real people respond to the questions customers ask, too. For instance, if they ask whether a large or a medium would fit them better based on their measurement, have your customer support agents fully informed and ready to answer.

Create a loyalty program

Prompting a customer for their email to send reminders of abandoned carts is a good first step, but to really take it to the next level, create a loyalty program. That means offering exclusive offers to subscribers, limited-time coupons, and other perks only they are eligible for.

Test, test, test

A/B testing is part of the lifeblood of ecommerce stores. If you try something new on your PDPs in an attempt to decrease cart abandonment, ensure you gather data and compare it to what happens if you make no changes.

This will save you time and headaches. Even more importantly, it will keep you from permanently introducing changes that annoy customers and drive away even more sales. It is worth it to take the time to test everything.

Personalize everything

All the strategies above are great, but they will feel corporate and hollow unless you personalize them. Let’s start with the obvious, such as beginning every email with a customer’s name.

Digging deeper, you can harness the data you have on your customers to target your Shopify cart recovery content further. For example, if you have created a loyalty program, send emails based on products your customer has already bought as a prompt to finish buying their current languishing cart.

Put this personalization effort into push notifications, too. Remember, they are on a customer’s private device: their phone. On the flip side, don’t get carried away and send a reminder of an abandoned cart at three a.m. or anything like that.

Recovering Abandoned Carts on Shopify: Key Takeaway

There's no silver bullet that will help you recover every abandoned cart. Abandoned carts are a fact of life in ecommerce.

But a multi-pronged approach, applying different strategies for different types of customers, will help you reduce your abandoned cart rate and recapture a portion of those carts that would otherwise have been lost.

Start by preventing abandoned carts in the first place by making checkout smooth and easy, showcasing your ecommerce store as trustworthy, and being honest and upfront with pricing. Recovering abandoned carts requires personalization, targeting, and multiple ways to get back in touch with customers.

And the most effective way to recapture abandoned carts on Shopify is to launch your own app and send push notifications. Get a free preview of your app and contact MobiLoud today to see how easy it is to build your own app right now.