How to Avoid Mobile Shopping Cart Abandonment and Excel at Mobile Commerce

The global mobile commerce market size was $628 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow 34% between 2021 and 2026. Given this increase in mobile commerce transactions, it is important for retailers to start paying attention to mobile shopping carts.

According to eMarketer, mobile commerce constitutes ~63% of total online retail sales and that share is expected to reach 73% by the end of 2021.

What does this mean for your ecommerce website?

That mcommerce is more important now than ever before, and its importance is only going to grow further. But a big issue in mcommerce is that of shoppers abandoning their carts.

So, how exactly can you avoid this problem and grow your ecommerce store?

By investing in mobile commerce and building a mobile shop that minimizes mobile shopping cart abandonment and maximizes your mobile conversion rate.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can avoid mobile cart abandonment.

How Can You Ace Your Mcommerce Game?

We now know the importance of mobile commerce for an online store. However, winning at mobile commerce and growing your mobile shop is not as easy as it seems.

It is especially difficult since a big majority of mobile shoppers abandon their mobile shopping cart without making a purchase.

According to a Barilliance study, the rate of mobile cart abandonment rate is much higher than that on any other device.

So, it becomes essential for online retailers to ensure that they have a solid mcommerce strategy that drives conversions. And providing a good mobile shopping experience is key to that.

If you aren’t working actively to reduce your mobile cart abandonment rate, your mobile shop is going to suffer eventually.

 

Let’s take a look at some of the best strategies that you can use to deliver a great mobile shopping experience and win at commerce to grow your mobile shop:

1. Build a Mobile-Friendly Website

The most crucial element of your online store strategy should be creating an ecommerce website that is optimized for mobile devices.

Mobile cart abandonment is a key challenge faced by online retailers today and can be easily avoided by creating a mobile-friendly online store.

If your ecommerce website gets stuck just when the shopper adds some products to their mobile shopping cart, you may lose out on customers. That’s why it’s important to focus on mobile friendliness to reduce your cart abandonment rate.

How Can You Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

• Use a responsive site design that is easily viewable across devices.
• Include a viewport meta tag to provide your browser instructions to ensure that the page fits the screen.
• Use larger font and button sizes, so that your users do not need to zoom in to read your content while using a mobile device.
• Use tools like Bootstrap to automatically scale your web pages for any device.
• Keep your mobile website layout simple and easy-to-use.
• Optimize your website’s images and image sizes to ensure that they load fast even on a mobile device.
• Improve your mobile website’s speed by minimizing redirects, optimizing images, improving server response time etc.

Use a mobile-first approach while designing your website and see its impact on sales conversions.

 

2. Optimize Your Checkout Page to Avoid Mobile Shopping Cart Abandonment

How convenient is the mobile shopping experience on your site?

One of the key reasons why so many people abandon their mobile shopping carts is that they find shopping on mobile websites inconvenient. In fact, according to Dynamic Yield, only 12% of customers find mobile shopping convenient.

A long, slow, or complicated checkout page is one of the main causes for this inconvenience. So, to improve your users’ mobile shopping experience and drive more conversions, you need to optimize your mobile checkout page.

If you want to excel at mobile commerce, you need to make sure your app or website makes it easy to shop online.

How Can You Optimize Your Mobile Checkout Page?

• Avoid long checkout pages and keep the layout as simple and short as possible.
• Provide your mobile shoppers the option to avoid registering altogether and make the purchase as a guest.
• Provide the option to login using Facebook or Google as that can save a lot of time for shoppers and can reduce mobile shopping cart abandonment.
• Ensure that you have a secure payment page as a lot of shoppers abandon their mobile shopping carts due to security concerns.
• If there are any promo codes that are applicable for a particular order, apply those automatically to avoid having shoppers go through the hassle of typing the codes.
• Provide all information on shipping charges beforehand, so that shoppers don’t feel cheated when they reach the payment page.
• Also, provide multiple delivery options so that users can pick the one that suits them best.
• Provide a variety of payment options to make it easier for customers to make purchases. Adding a mobile wallet would be especially helpful for mobile shopping as it makes the payment process much easier and faster.

Check out the checkout page of online retailer, ASOS. By showing the shipping charges upfront they removed any consumer concerns or hurdles to purchase. This reduces the likelihood of mobile shopping cart abandonment.

Additionally, they provided the option to log in through social media accounts to ease the checkout process.

Image Source: ASOS

You can also use the BigCommerce one-page checkout. It makes it faster and easier for your customers to complete purchases. Their platform has built-in features that cater to account creation leading to easy checkouts.

They also offer mobile optimization, guest checkout, and dedicated support to help customers stay on site before checkout.

BigCommerce also has a PayPal One-Touch feature that allows customers to check out instantly. Customers can access their PayPal balance, bank account, and other global payment options.

These are just some of the numerous ways in which you can optimize your mobile website’s checkout and payment process. Use these tips to reduce your mobile shopping cart abandonment rate and see your mobile commerce sales increase.

3. Optimize Your Product Pages

Even before your customers add products to their mobile shopping cart, they check out your product pages. While product pages are not exactly related to your mobile shopping cart, they may affect your overall customer experience.

Your product pages are what ultimately drive a potential customer’s purchase decision and, hence, should be optimized to drive conversions.

Also, a lot of people, especially the ones searching for a specific product, land directly on product pages without going through the home page. So, product pages are often your one shot at getting sales conversions.

If you want to reduce your mobile shopping cart abandonment rate, you need to pay more attention to your product pages.

What Are Some of the Best Ways to Optimize Your Mobile Website’s Product Pages?

• Use quality pictures, but of a smaller size so that they do not take time to load. Also, optimize the image dimensions to make those more mobile-friendly.
• Provide product recommendations to help your mobile shoppers find relevant products. Since navigating a website is anyway slightly difficult on mobile than on desktop, several users actually like to see recommendations.
• Add product features and benefits, but in a bulleted format that is easy to read on a mobile device. The majority of customers read product details before making a purchase decision and, hence, it is important to provide these even on your mobile website.
• Provide product reviews and ratings at the bottom of the product pages to help users make their purchase decision. According to an eMarketer report, 24.4% of shoppers always check reviews before buying a product, while 40.8% often check reviews.

Musician’s Friend has one of the best mobile product pages, with all the above-mentioned features.

They keep good quality, mobile-optimized product images, provide all product information in an easy-to-read format, and also provide customer reviews. They also provide product recommendations at the bottom of the page.

Not only does it improve the overall customer experience, but it also ensures that fewer people abandon their mobile shopping carts.

Image Source: Musician’s Friend

FAQs

Q1. What is shopping cart abandonment?

A. It refers to the situation where a prospective buyer adds items to their shopping cart but does not complete the payment process, thus abandoning the cart.

Q2. Why is shopping cart abandonment a problem for retailers?

A. Shopping cart abandonment is a problem because it means that something might be wrong because of which the prospective buyers are leaving their carts. It could be a slow checkout page, unsecure payment process, or another reason.

Abandoned carts also mean less revenue for the retailer.

Q3. How does shopping cart abandonment affect inventory?

A. When someone adds products to their carts, those products are removed from the inventory and shown as unavailable for purchase by others. So, an abandoned cart not only represents a missed sale, but also stops other buyers from buying those products, at least temporarily.

Q4. What are the effects of shopping cart abandonment?

A. A higher shopping cart abandonment rate represents a lack of consumer trust in the brand and is generally bad for business. It not only causes direct loss in sales revenue, but can also affect a brand’s reputation and customer trust.

Q5. What are the ways to avoid shopping cart abandonment?

A. You can reduce shopping cart abandonment by optimizing your checkout and payment pages. Making the checkout process easier is the first step as it reduces the likelihood of a buyer leaving midway.

It is also a good idea to get an SSL certification and tell prospective customers that they can make safe and secure payments on your website.

Q6. What average percent of all online shopping carts are abandoned?

A. Some studies have shown that as much as 67% of shopping carts are abandoned. This, clearly, is a very high number and is a big problem for retailers.

Q7. What is shopping cart abandonment rate?

A. It is the percentage of people who abandoned their carts among the total number of people who added items to their shopping cart.

Q8. What is a good shopping cart abandonment rate?

A. Ideally, the lower the rate of shopping cart abandonment, the better it is for retailers. However, it is almost impossible to reach 0% shopping cart abandonment rate. But, anything lower than 20% is considered a good rate.

Q9. How to use data to reduce shopping cart abandonment?

A. Data on shopping cart abandonment can provide great insights into the reasons for abandonment. And, once you know the problem, it is much easier to fix it.

Ready to Excel at Mobile Commerce?

Mobile commerce is growing by leaps and bounds and will continue to outpace ecommerce in the future as well. However, in order to get the best out of your mcommerce initiatives, you need to overcome the glaring issue of mobile shopping cart abandonment.

The techniques detailed in this article will help you lower your mobile shopping cart abandonment rate and provide a good mobile shopping experience to your customers. They will also help you drive sales conversions from your mobile website.

Try these techniques out and share your success stories with us in the comments.

Do you have any more strategies to reduce mobile shopping cart abandonment rates? Let us know in the comments below.