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Cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems for online companies.
Studies show that nearly 70% of first-time eCommerce shoppers abandon the website after adding items to the cart.
This article gives a brief overview of the popular methods available to reduce cart abandonment rates along with their pros and cons to help you decide where you should invest your money.
Cart Abandonment – Why Unique To Online Shopping
In a retail shopping situation, customers might browse the products and leave the store but they would rarely leave the store during the checkout process after they have decided to purchase the items.
The cart abandonment situation specifically happens in online shopping because customers learn much information about the orders and delivery only after adding items to their cart.
For example, they will get to know about the taxes, shipping charges, delivery time, offers, return policies, etc., usually after adding items to the cart. Few charges could even show up as a surprise.
Some customers would feel the lack of guest checkout options, lengthy account creation processes, limited payment methods, website errors as barriers to finishing the transaction.
To get such customers back to the cart page and influence them to finish the checkout process, there are a few newer and advanced solutions available in the market today.
8 Popular Methods To Reduce Cart Abandonment
1. Conversational Chatbot 
A conversational chatbot is a more advanced chatbot than a rule-based one. It is built with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies to mimic human-like conversations with website visitors. Companies can customize it according to their brand character and voice and program it to make friendly or professional conversations with their online customers. When a visitor enters the site, it instantly sends them a welcome message, asks them what they are looking for, and responds almost accurately according to their inputs. It can perform some of the tasks such as personalized product recommendations, registering for upcoming events/sale, increasing average order value, solving customers’ common queries, etc. By 2023, 112% of eCommerce transactions are projected to be carried out via chatbots. To reduce cart abandonment, companies can use conversational chatbots to trigger reminder alerts, offer personalized deals or coupons, and allow customers to create accounts via a dialogue-driven approach
To learn more about, conversational chatbots and how to reduce cart abandonment rates using them, get the free ebook.
2. Abandoned Cart Email 
Abandoned cart email is one of the emerging methods to recover abandoned carts. These emails are sent as part of retargeting campaigns to customers who have left the site after adding items to the cart. It is kind of a follow-up email that reminds customers about the abandoned cart items and also helps send personalized offers or coupons to get customers back to the website and finish the checkout process. It is one of the commonly used tools to recover abandoned carts and works to an extent.
3. Exit Intent Popups 
Exit-intent popups are one of the commonly used methods to prevent customers from leaving the site. It is used for a variety of purposes such as lead generation, opt-in downloads, event registration, availing discount offers, etc. Exit-intent popups serve as a good tool to prevent customers from leaving the cart page. It allows companies to display offers such as free shipping, discounts, rewards, etc., to influence customers to complete the checkout process.
4. Push Notifications 
Push notifications are another emerging cart recovery tool wherein you can alert your customers about abandoned cart items via notification bars. It can be used on both website and mobile applications. When customers leave your website or mobile app without finishing the checkout process, you can alert them with custom messages, badges, sounds, and updates that can motivate them to return to the cart page. However, customers should opt-in to receive notifications and too many notifications might make customers disable the functionality quickly.
5. SMS 
SMS is another usable medium to recover abandoned carts. It allows companies to share reminder messages about the items customers have left in the cart. It further allows companies to send customized offers to get customers back to the website and finish the transaction. Companies can also share updates and other transactional messages to increase interaction with their customers and build loyalty.
6. Messenger and WhatsApp 
Messenger and WhatsApp are other popular channels to recover abandoned carts. With Messenger bots, companies can directly reach customers on their Messenger apps and inform them about the items they have left in the cart. They can also send personalized messages with article links, images, videos, etc., and make the customers act. Likewise, the companies can send notifications on WhatsApp too.
7. Live Chat 
Live chat has been there for a while now and it works differently than other cart recovery methods. It enables customers to express their concerns or ask questions to the support agents via websites and get responses. It is helpful in situations such as asking for more product information, negotiating for shipping charges, requesting coupon codes, etc., where customers can type their message to the support agents and have their questions answered. It is a chat system deployed on the website and makes humans interact with humans.
8. AdWords Retargeting 
AdWords retargeting is yet another way to recover abandoned carts. Companies can show text ads, static images, animated images, videos, and responsive ads to their customers on search engines and influence them to visit their website. It is usually done as a remarketing campaign where companies need to create an audience list or a target group and display ads for them.
Pros and Cons
| Method | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Conversational Chatbot | ||
| Abandoned Cart Email | ||
| Exit Intent Popups | ||
| Push Notification | ||
| SMS | ||
| Messenger and WhatsApp | ||
| Live Chat | ||
| AdWords Retargeting |
To sum up,
Companies lose several dollars in revenue due to cart abandonment. One of the golden rules to reduce cart abandonment is to provide a transparent and well-informed checkout process for the customers.
Companies need to ensure that their customers are receiving every order-related information such as stock availability, taxes, shipping charges, delivery time, return and refund policies, warranties, discounts, etc., clearly while they are initiating the checkout process.
If they don’t, there is a huge possibility of losing customers at the cart.
Tools like conversational chatbots, live chat, exit-intent pop-ups help companies to recover abandoned carts while customers are browsing their site. Cart abandonment email, SMS, Messenger and WhatsApp bots, AdWords, push notifications act as retargeting tools to recover abandoned carts.
Hence, before investing in a tool/solution, companies need to think about what suits their business best and how quickly they want to win back lost sales.
To learn more about RoundView conversational cart assistant chatbot and how you can reduce cart abandonment up to 35% with it, schedule a FREE demo with us.
The insights you get in our 10-minute demo can help you understand how to recover abandoned carts cost-effectively and successfully using chatbots.
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