Commerce table stakes that may be costing you millions
There are many places along the online customer journey with opportunities for refinement and improvement. However, there is one area with a lot of potential that is often overlooked — purchase conversion. Following an add-to-basket step, there are several reasons in the checkout flow that can derail a potential purchase. With an average fallout rate of 70% in the checkout flow, addressing basket abandonment is crucial for recouping potential revenue. Conservatively, recapturing just a small percentage of shoppers who abandon their checkout earns a healthy increase in overall conversion rate.
There are a few core reasons customers repeatedly cite for why they do not complete their transaction. In this discussion, we will cover some of the top reasons customers abandon their baskets along with ideas to mitigate this loss and recoup millions of dollars of potential revenue.
Unexpected costs or delivering rates (31%)
The biggest reason customers abandon a transaction is unexpected costs, fees or delivering rates — and the inability to see those up front. With large ecommerce companies setting the baseline, customers have come to expect free delivery options. As a result, businesses need to analyse and test free delivery thresholds, offer promotions for first-time buyers and consider the long-term value of customer acquisition.
Consider offering free delivery based on purchase categories, spending thresholds or customer groups to improve your conversion rates. This is an opportunity for deep analysis and robust A/B testing, using a tool like Adobe Target. While it wouldn’t make sense to sell at a loss, testing incentives or free delivery promotions may improve other metrics like boosting conversion rates, increasing first-time purchases, faster subsequent purchases and larger average order value.
If customers complete the checkout process only to be met with an unexpected delivery cost, it could generate negative sentiment toward your brand and motivate your customers to look elsewhere. This is a key area for testing to determine whether the cost of delivering is potentially costing you much more.
Friction, distractions and site performance issues (18%)
The next set of factors contributing to basket abandonment includes friction, distraction and site performance issues during the checkout process. Friction may be anything making the checkout process more cumbersome than it needs to be, including slow-loading pages, glitches causing customers to re-enter their information or long checkout processes.
Using tools like Instant Purchase, one-page checkout and credit-card vaulting can help to reduce unnecessary steps to purchase. Additionally, as you deploy new code, rigorous testing and release processes can help to prevent conflicts in your production environment that could impede the checkout process. Regularly check that your API calls — specifically those to third-party SaaS systems — are both needed and timely as users pass through checkout. Define multiple user types and user journeys to test not only during new deployments but also under performance and load testing. As you add new features or messaging, make# sure that that they don’t distract customers into a new task or take them away from the checkout process. For example, basket recommendations work well for adding accessories related to items in a user’s basket, but it’s best to keep users on the basket page rather than sending them back to a product detail page.
The payment experience (17%)
The payment experience is the third reason potential customers become apprehensive about completing their transaction. First, there are concerns about the security of the transaction and second, you may not be offering their preferred payment method.
When it comes to security, savvy customers will look for SSL certificates, padlock icons and trust seals. SSL certificates, which provide a padlock icon and are part of the trust seal certification, are included with the Adobe Commerce Cloud service. Ensure your ecommerce store makes security obvious as you build a reputable brand. Keep your site secure and software up to date — as a single news story about a data breach will severely affect your ecommerce business and trusted reputation.
As for preferred payment methods, you need to understand your customer base and the payment tools they use. For example, younger generations prefer debit cards, mobile wallets and cash apps, whereas older generations lead with credit cards. Providing the right balance of payment methods may keep these customers on their path to purchase. Payment Services for Adobe Commerce offers several ways to meet your customer’s expectations by accepting credit cards, payment apps, “buy now, pay later” and other popular payment methods. Even if you don’t use the payment functionalities Adobe offers, the platform integrates with various payment gateways and other payment service providers out-of-the-box.
Privacy (12%)
The final reason customers don’t complete checkout is their hesitation in proceeding when personal information is required up front. An account set-up requirement means the user has to have resolute trust in your brand. Consider using guest checkout and create a post-purchase option to convert their information into an account. Upfront questions and requesting excessive details could cause clients to become too guarded and may be costing you the sale. If there is not a business, industry or government regulation preventing you from selling your product to an unknown shopper, it may be worth keeping their identity a mystery (for now). Here we have another opportunity to run an A/B test with guest checkout and review how the results turn out. Once you build the trust of your customer and they become a repeat shopper, perhaps they will be more willing to receive additional outreach from your business. In many cases, clients are wary of overflowing inboxes so being clear about how you’ll use the information may also help in acquiring new contacts for your business.
How to recapture abandoned baskets
Abandoned basket emails are the highest converting emails both in open rate and purchase. However, to execute these campaigns, you’ll need a reliable way to know who shoppers are and which products they’ve left behind. This is another opportunity to engage with your shoppers in a more meaningful way rather than a generic blast of “Did you forget something?” to all customers that recently visited. For this you can use the abandoned basket report from the standard reporting within Adobe Commerce. Or, with more sophistication, you can directly integrate with Adobe Journey Optimizer to use real-time messaging across multiple channels following an abandon event.
Learn how to use Adobe Journey Optimizer to send personalised abandoned-basket emails.
Regular analysis and optimisation of your checkout process is crucial. By addressing these key issues — unexpected costs, checkout friction, payment concerns and privacy worries, ecommerce businesses can potentially recoup millions in lost revenue. The key lies in understanding customer expectations, streamlining the purchase process and building trust with transparent practices and secure transactions. You’ll need to apply critical thinking toward this area and revisit it regularly to ensure it doesn’t run off course over time.
With the sample data in this article, which uses reasonable industry averages, we can see conservative projections of what a small percentage of abandoned-basket recapture would yield. If you neglect these key issues, they could indeed be costing you millions.
Need more guidance?
To learn more about Adobe products that may be integrated to improve your conversion rate, please see the following links:
Adobe products discussed:
For additional resources on using key basket and checkout features, please see the following articles on Adobe Experience League:
Adobe Experience League References:
Payment Services for Adobe Commerce
Integrate Adobe Commerce and Adobe Journey Optimizer
Caprice Cartier is a senior product specialist for Adobe Commerce. She has spent the last 17 years working with the largest Internet retailers across a variety of technologies and initiatives in both professional services and customer success. She has worked with customers using the Adobe Commerce platform for the past seven years.
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