Abandoned shopping 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 finalizing their order.

This is an important indicator in the purchase tunnel, showing that the customer has shown genuine interest without moving on to the act of buying.

This stage is part of online consumer behavior and can be caused by a variety of factors, including hesitation or obstacles during the buying process.

Analyzing abandoned shopping carts enables e-tailers to better understand the disincentives to purchase and optimize their shopping tunnel.

Cart abandonment tracking helps identify the critical stages where customers get lost, providing leads to improve the user experience and increase conversions.

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

Concretely, an abandoned basket is detected via the interaction tracking system on the e-commerce site or application. Tracking tools record when a user adds products to their cart but fails to validate the order within a defined timeframe.

The data collected is analyzed to find out at exactly what point the customer stopped, making it possible to identify obstacles or friction points in the purchase tunnel.

Then, depending on strategies, e-tailers can automate actions, such as sending personalized follow-up emails or proposing special offers to encourage order finalization.

Benefits:

• Increases sales through follow-up with interested prospects.
• Provides valuable data on buying behavior and the obstacles encountered by customers.
• Improves the user experience by identifying points to be optimized in the buying tunnel.

Disadvantages:

• The recovery rate is never guaranteed and varies according to the method employed.
• Can generate an email overload for the customer, causing irritation or loss of trust.
• Technical implementation and follow-up strategies can be costly or complex for some structures.

A ready-to-wear e-commerce site notices that 70% of customers add items to their shopping cart without checking out. By analyzing this abandoned cart, the team detects a problem when calculating shipping costs.

They decide to implement an emailing campaign with a time-limited promo code, which enables them to recover 15% of abandonments and increase sales.

Another use case: an online hardware store uses a chatbot to engage users who have left an abandoned cart, helping them finalize their order by answering their questions in real time.

• MDN Web Docs - Guide to abandoned cart recovery
• Shopify - Understanding and managing the abandoned cart
• OptiMonk - Best practices for reducing the abandoned cart