Imagine if 100 shoppers entered your store all at once. Great, right? Now, imagine that 69 of those customers browsed for a while, put items in their basket, then put those baskets down and left?
When you imagine this scenario playing out in a brick-and mortar store, it seems almost absurd. But that’s exactly what’s happening online. Research by the Baymard Institute shows that online shopping cart abandonment reached an average rate of 69.99% in 2022.
Those abandoned baskets show you how many people are interested enough to visit your store. Unfortunately, they also represent a significant amount of lost revenue. To challenge the statistics, e-commerce merchants need to find out what’s stopping those customers from finalizing the purchase and change it.
Canadians top the charts at abandoning carts
The statistics paint a depressing picture for e-commerce retailers in Canada, where cart abandonment rates are among the highest in the world.
Data gathered in the second quarter of 2022 by the Salesforce Shopping Index showed that shopping cart abandonment was highest by those on mobile phones. They opted out of purchases 90% of the time, followed by users on tablets, at 84%. Desktop shoppers were still very fickle, abandoning their carts 81% of the time.
Businesses spend mega money to attract customers to their sites. When purchases go uncompleted, that translates into mega losses for retailers.
Why don’t shoppers finish what they started?
Shopping cart abandonment is one area we can’t blame entirely on the distraction of modern living. In the Baymard Institute study, researchers also asked shoppers to provide their top reasons for not completing the purchase process online. The most frequently cited reason, from 48% of those surveyed, was that shipping costs and taxes were too high.
Requiring shoppers to create an account during checkout was a big turn-off for 24% of people. Other shoppers (22%) hesitated when they learned about delivery timeframes. Many want the item right away, and lose interest when it could take weeks or longer to arrive.
Next, there’s the functioning of the website itself and the all-important issue of trust. Sometimes the transaction takes too long to process or, worse, the website crashes. Nearly 1 in 5 online shoppers (18%) attributed their shopping cart abandonment to lost confidence during the transaction. They felt they could not trust the site with their credit card details and personal information.
A related issue is payment method. Nearly 1 out of 10 shoppers (9%) left their cart because they didn’t see their preferred payment option at checkout. Digital wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet are gaining popularity with shoppers and let them avoid sharing credit card details with untrusted sites. So do popular international apps, like Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Union Pay. When customers see the app they love using most, they are more likely to buy.
While e-commerce has revolutionized shopping by taking it global, that sales advantage can sometimes cause unanticipated problems at checkout. Payment methods and currencies vary from country to country. If shoppers don’t see prices calculated in their local currency, or don’t see their preferred method of payment, they often leave the site.
Strategies for reducing shopping cart abandonment
With so much lost revenue at stake, but so many different reasons for shopping cart abandonment, where should retailers begin?
In e-commerce, the obvious place to start is by addressing any website performance issues. If your website is not functioning at an optimum level, you can’t expect shoppers to stick around for long.
Shipping and taxes are more challenging. Those costs have a huge impact on whether sales are finalized, but retailers can’t just lower or assume these costs. Offering discounts at checkout is one way of softening the blow and sweetening the deal. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) plans are also gaining traction with shoppers and help reduce cart abandonment. They divide a large total bill into smaller chunks and work like an instalment plan.
While payment method problems were cited by fewer shoppers, it’s one of the easiest issues to solve. Extrapolating from the Baymard Institute study, if 9% of shoppers were given the right payment option, they might have completed their purchases. That’s a lot of lost revenue.
Stores appealing to global audiences should localize their websites to reflect local currencies and payment preferences. Wherever their audience, online stores should explore popular payment options and offer the widest possible range.
OTT Pay Checkout, an integrated solution to streamline payment
To reduce shopping cart abandonment, merchants need to streamline the process and eliminate friction, and enhance the process for different customer segments. That can be a complicated process. Many retailers don’t have the time or expertise to improve things quickly.
To make things easier, retailers can use integrated solutions like OTT Pay Checkout. It lets merchants easily expand their payment options and offer seamless, secure payment through an API that easily integrates with several different e-commerce platforms.
OTT Pay Checkout currently supports payment through many of the world’s most popular apps – Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Union Pay – with plans for additional payment methods in future. When customers are ready to check out, OTT Pay Checkout lets them choose from a wide range of payment methods. After the payment is made, customers continue on their seamless customer journey as designed by the merchant.
The solution is fully secure and developed to the latest industry standards. No technical maintenance is required, as OTT Pay handles all the back end updates.
OTT Pay Checkout is an efficient and cost effective way for retailers to offer global customers their preferred payment options. These days, that’s the difference between a frustrated customer with an abandoned cart and a happy, return customer with a finalized purchase and a delivery already on the way.
Payment options for the win
Shopping cart abandonment will never entirely disappear. It’s natural for customers to change their minds at checkout and want to keep browsing. But if customers are leaving because of something that’s easily changed, that’s a missed opportunity. With the right strategy, retailers can tackle some easy website upgrade and convert those moments of checkout friction into lucrative sales.
The lack of preferred payment methods is an easy fix. Retailers who want to gain a global foothold, or appeal to a new group of customers, should investigate their preferred online payment options and make sure they’re available, secure, and easy to transact.
Increasingly, the way for retailers to easily manage this is through an integrated single solution, such as OTT Pay Checkout.
To learn more about OTT Pay Checkout and for assistance tailoring a digital payment solution for your business, contact our digital payment specialists today: 1.800.688.9838
OTT Pay is a leading FinTech company in Canada providing secure, fast and convenient payment aggregator services that enable merchants to accept various types of payment methods to meet the customer needs, with a mission to build an ecosystem connecting consumers and businesses globally for more opportunities. OTT Pay is a member of the OTT Group of Companies, a diversified financial services group that has been delivering trusted financial services since 2006. The Group provides services in securities distribution, investment brokerage, asset management, and global settlement, in addition to payment services.