Why Website Abandonment Matters (& How To Fix It)

If your website includes any kind of buying mechanism, you’ve probably thought a little bit about ‘abandonment’. ‘Abandonment’ (sometimes called ‘an abandoned cart’) is when a potential buyer leaves your site without completing a transaction: ie. they added something to their basket, but they didn’t check out.

Why Worry About Abandonment?

One way of looking at a basic e-commerce sale is to break it down into four steps:

1. Get the visitor to your site
2. Show the visitor (or allow them to find) a product they’re interested in
3. Provide them with enough persuasive information about that product to get them to add it to their cart
4. Get the visitor to complete checkout

If a potential customer ‘abandons’ on your site, it means you’ve managed to get them past steps 1, 2 & 3: You’ve found a visitor who is happy with your product & comfortable enough on your site to think seriously about making a purchase.

When, between stages 3 & 4, your visitor decides not to buy, one of two things could have happened:

1. The visitor may never have really intended to buy, or they may have been taken away from the site by something totally out of your control (eg a phone call)
2. The visitor may have firmly intended to buy, but something on your site caused them to abandon

There will always be abandonments caused by the first group of visitors & that is nothing to worry about. But, if you can figure out what happened (or didn’t happen) to cause the second group of visitors to give up, you could gain extra sales & therefore make more money.

How Can We Fix Abandonment?

Here’s a simple four-step plan to tackle abandonment on your site:

1. Measure The Abandonments

• Set up tracking to measure abandonment three ways:
1. Abandoned Carts - How many orders are you potentially missing out on?
2. Abandoned Products - Are your abandonment figures the same across all of your product ranges? Are certain products abandoned more than others?
3. Abandoned Units - (units x unit price) how much money are you potentially losing in sales? Measuring this also helps you weed out ‘false positives’ where a visitor may add a very large quantity of products to their cart, which may otherwise skew your figures
• Set up tracking to see where potential customers are abandoning your site

2. Investigate The Problems

• Use analytics to find out where most of your abandonments occur
• Go through the buying process yourself looking for potential obstacles / areas which would destroy trust in your site
• Run usability tests on your product pages & checkout funnel
• Survey your visitors / previous buyers (if your visitors abandon whilst logged in, you could even gather their details & ask them specifically what happened)

3. Fix The Issues

• Use the findings of your investigations to categorise your site’s problems
• Plan a fix (or series of ‘test’ fixes) to address each problem
• Put together a schedule for implementing each of the proposed fixes

4. Measure The Fixes & Optimise

• Decide how you can measure the result of each of your fixes
• Put tracking in place to measure the effects of these fixes at regular intervals
• Implement each of your fixes
• Calculate the results of each fix
• Implement alternative fixes where results haven’t improved