Are you struggling with customers leaving your Shopify store without completing their orders?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Cart abandonment is consistently one of the biggest pain points for ecommerce store owners, and for good reason. The average cart abandonment rate is around 66.5%. That means three-quarters of visitors aren’t completing their purchasing journey.
That’s a lot of missed revenue. But why aren’t visitors finishing their purchases?
The truth is cart abandonment is always going to happen, and sometimes it’s for reasons outside of your control. But there are a few ways you can reduce cart abandonment. And we’re going to show you how you can do this in your Shopify store.
Let’s get started!
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What is Shopify cart abandonment?
Shopify cart abandonment is when online shoppers add products to their virtual shopping carts but leave the Shopify store without completing the purchase.
It’s a common occurrence in ecommerce and can significantly impact the revenue of an online store.
Most customers abandon their carts for reasons like unexpected costs, complicated checkout processes, or simply being distracted before finalizing the purchase.
What’s the average cart abandonment rate?
The average cart abandonment rate across ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, fluctuates but typically falls between 60% to 80%.
This means that for every ten customers who add items to their shopping carts, six to eight of them leave the website without completing the purchase.
While this statistic may seem daunting, it highlights the importance of implementing effective strategies to recover abandoned carts and improve conversion rates.
What's the best way to stop shopping cart abandonment?
One effective strategy to combat Shopify cart abandonment is the use of exit-intent popups.
These popups are triggered when a user demonstrates behavior suggesting they’re about to leave the online store, such as moving their cursor towards the close button or switching tabs.
You can use exit-intent popups to grab your visitor’s attention before they leave. This gives you the opportunity to persuade on-the-fence customers to complete their purchase by enticing them with a discount or deal.
The right exit-intent popup can convert at least 25% of your abandoning visitors into subscribers and paying customers. Ready to learn how?
5 cart abandonment popup types for your Shopify store
Now that we’ve talked about the incredible value exit-intent popups have, let’s look at how to use them to stop shopping cart abandonment.
We’ve come up with 5 great popup strategies that will help every ecommerce store owner reduce cart abandonment.
1. Nudge visitors by offering free shipping
Did you know that shipping costs are one of the most common reasons for abandoned checkouts?
A survey found that 48% of online shoppers abandon carts because of high shipping costs and other hidden fees.
This means that you can recover some Shopify abandoned carts by offering free shipping on orders over a certain value.
Here’s an example from a luxury furniture company, OKA. They offered free shipping to anyone who spent more than £150 (approximately $207) on their site.
There are two reasons why we love this Shopify popup:
- Cart abandoners who are put off by unexpected shipping costs and other hidden fees are encouraged to complete their purchases—and many will.
- Setting a free shipping threshold encourages shoppers to spend more money at your store to qualify.
You can get started with these shopping cart abandonment popup templates offering free shipping:
2. Promote a special offer right before visitors leave your website
Shoppers abandon carts for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s triggered by an inconvenient checkout process, other times it’s because they’re simply not ready to spend money.
As we saw in the graph above, nearly half of customers abandon carts because of costs. You can recover some of those carts by offering customers a discount code with an exit-intent popup.
Just make sure that your offer is irresistible. The Turmeric Co.’s popup is a good example of this.
This cart abandonment popup template below speaks directly to the visitors’ pain point, which increases your odds of completing the purchase.
3. Offer discounts for a limited time only
Everyone loves a good discount. But sometimes, you’ll need to give a little extra push to convert those potential customers who are still shopping around. That’s where urgency can help.
It’s basic psychology. Offering customers a discount for a limited time only taps into that FOMO–the fear of missing out.
With this strategy, you can encourage customers to quickly complete their purchases so they don’t lose their discount.
Use the power of urgency by adding a countdown timer to your popup.
Offering a 10% discount incentivizes the purchase—because we all love a good deal. But it’s ultimately the countdown timer that helps customers make their purchasing decisions.
When you create a sense of urgency, you give on-the-fence customers the nudge they need to complete their buyer’s journey.
Notice how the purpose of this abandoned cart popup is different than the previous one we showed? This type of popup focuses on driving sales by using urgency. The other popup focuses on growing your email list (alongside encouraging customers to complete their purchasing journey).
Try these abandoned cart popup templates if you’d like to feature a countdown timer:
Pro tip: Get the attention of your visitors and increase your coupon usage rate even more by displaying a reminder sticky bar for people who saw the abandoned cart recovery popup with the countdown timer.
The sticky bar appears as soon as visitors close your popup. That way, you can remind customers of their coupon code and remaining time without interrupting their browsing experience with additional popup messages.
4. Offer gifts based on customers’ cart value
What if there was a way to strengthen brand loyalty, increase customer spending, and reduce cart abandonment? This hat trick might sound difficult to pull off, but it’s easier than you think. All you have to do is motivate customers with a small gift or free sample.
Here’s how you can do it:
- Set a spending threshold for gifts and samples (e.g., If you sell cosmetics, give customers free makeup samples when they spend more than $150).
- Create an exit-intent popup for cart abandoners that offers them a gift if they complete their purchase.
Increase customer spending by including a message like “You’re almost there! Spent $4 more to get a gift!”
Rewarding customers with small gifts and samples doesn’t just reduce shopping cart abandonment.
It’s also great for building brand loyalty. According to the Loyalty Barometer Report by Merkle, approximately 58% of customers believe offering small rewards is the most important thing brands can do to strengthen relationships and increase loyalty.
In other words, that small gift might be the thing that turns your one-time customer into a lifelong supporter.
5. Collect feedback from abandoning visitors
The most effective way to reduce shopping cart abandonment is by getting to the root of the problem and fixing it. Some of your visitors may be abandoning their carts because of bad UX (user experience).
UX reasons for abandoned shopping carts include:
- Not allowing guest checkout
- You have a long or complicated checkout process
- Difficulty navigating your website
- Your return policy isn’t in a visible location
The good news is that these things are easy to fix. But you’ll never know what to change if you don’t ask. So, start collecting feedback from your customers.
You can do this by targeting cart abandoners with an exit-intent survey popup.
Surveying abandoning visitors may not stop cart abandonment in the short term, but it will help reduce Shopify cart abandonment in the future.
That’s because good customer feedback gives you valuable insight into your checkout experience and tells you how to improve your sales journey.
Here are a few survey popup templates for ecommerce stores:
If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of your abandoned cart recovery popups and save even more cart abandoners, check out these 5 hacks:
Wrapping up
There you have it. Five easy ways to reduce cart abandonment on your Shopify store using exit-intent popups. Now, it’s time to create some popups of your own.
You can use OptiMonk’s drag-and-drop editor to create a sophisticated popup from scratch—no coding knowledge required. Or you can choose a ready-made template from our expansive Template Library and deploy your first cart abandonment popup in a couple of minutes.
Create an OptiMonk account today to get started. It only takes 30 seconds to sign up.
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