Improving Your Shopping Cart Abandonment on Amazon

If you’re an online retailer selling on an e-commerce site like Amazon FBA or your own website, you’ve probably already encountered and struggled with the problem of shopping cart abandonment, which happens when a customer adds an item to their cart but then leaves the site prior to checking out. This is known as cart abandonment on Amazon.

Can You Fix Cart Abandonment?

Since you can’t always tell how long or why a person put your item into their shopping cart but never checked out, details you glean from your own website can help you address these issues on Amazon. As an Amazon FBA seller, you must me mindful of cart abandonment on Amazon even if you cannot address all the causes behind it.

E-commerce businesses of all sizes and shapes experience cart abandonment, and there are steps that you can take to increase the chances that the person will become a converted buyer and check out with the items in their cart. Your cart abandonment rate is something you should calculate and better understand, especially if you operate your own website.

How to Determine Cart Abandonment Rates When You Have Data Access

Your cart abandonment rate equals 1- {the total number of shoppers who checked out with their transactions divided by the total number of shoppers who added something to their cart}. Any e-commerce merchant will be familiar with cart abandonment and understand that it’s a major pain point that keeps you from being able to grow your profits. It’s simple, however, to ignore how much of a major impact cart abandonment can have.

It’s anticipated that more than $4.6 trillion in sales on e-commerce website are lost every single year due to cart abandonment. The most likely items to be abandoned in a cart are clothing, tech and housewares, and nearly half of all shoppers admit to abandoning something during a check out in the past year. That’s compared with only one-quarter of people who walk away from a purchase in an actual brick and mortar store.

Average cart abandonment rates across all industries are over 75%. This happens every single day, and mobile drives a tremendous amount of e-commerce traffic, but has even a higher average abandonment rate of 80%.

Some of the most common concerns that lead customers to abandon their car include:

• Issues related to security
• Complex check out procedures
• Required registration
• Hidden fees and costs
• High shipping costs

There are things you can do to evaluate your current cart abandonment statistics and work to improve them. This will not only enhance your profits but the overall experience that customers have in working with you, and this process is instrumental in protecting your business if you are an e-commerce site operating on your own.

If an average check out form contains 15 fields, for example, you can simplify a check out by reducing this. Showcase your security credentials, be upfront about any fees and costs and offer affordable shipping. All of these can entice a buyer who is already on the edge of checking out with your product in their cart, to taking the next step.