Abandoned Cart: Definition, Issues, and Explanations

An abandoned cart refers to a common situation in e-commerce where a customer selects products and adds them to their virtual cart, but leaves the site or app before completing their order.

This is an important indicator in the purchase funnel, showing that the customer has expressed genuine interest without actually making a purchase.

This step is part of online consumer behavior and can be caused by various factors, including hesitation or obstacles during the purchasing process.

Analyzing abandoned shopping carts allows e-merchants to better understand the barriers to purchase and optimize their purchase funnel.

Tracking cart abandonment helps identify critical stages where customers are lost, providing insights for improving the user experience and increasing conversions.

It also serves as a lever for implementing targeted follow-up campaigns, such as sending personalized emails or notifications to recover these potential sales.

In practical terms, an abandoned cart is detected via the interaction tracking system on the website or e-commerce application. Tracking tools record when a user adds products to their cart but does not complete the order within a defined time frame.

The collected data is analyzed to determine the exact moment when the customer stopped, allowing obstacles or friction points in the purchase funnel to be identified.

Next, depending on their strategies, e-merchants can automate actions such as sending personalized reminder emails or offering special deals to encourage customers to complete their orders.

Advantages:

• Enables you to increase sales by re-engaging interested prospects.
• Provides valuable data on purchasing behavior and obstacles encountered by customers.
• Improves the user experience by identifying areas for optimization in the purchase funnel.

Disadvantages:

• The recovery rate is never guaranteed and varies depending on the method used.
• May generate an overload of emails for the customer, causing irritation or loss of trust.
• Technical implementation and recovery strategies can be costly or complex for some organizations.

An e-commerce site selling ready-to-wear clothing noticed that 70% of customers added items to their cart without checking out. By analyzing these abandoned carts, the team detected a problem with the delivery fee calculation.

They decide to implement an email campaign with a limited-time promo code, which allows them to recover 15% of abandoned carts and increase revenue.

Another use case: an online computer equipment store uses a chatbot to engage users who have abandoned their shopping carts, helping them to complete their orders by answering their questions in real time.

• MDN Web Docs – Guide to recovering abandoned shopping carts
• Shopify – Understanding and managing abandoned carts
• OptiMonk – Best practices for reducing cart abandonment