How to Use a Shopping Cart Abandonment Survey to Bump Up Conversions

It’s a great day!

The sun is shining. The birds are singing. Your coffee tastes fantastic as you take a sip and sit down, pop open your laptop, log into your Shopify admin page, and take a gander at your orders.

Record scratch.

What’s up with all these abandoned carts?!

On the average eCommerce site, 77% of shoppers leave without completing their purchases.

Bummer, right?

But the good news is, there are a lot of things you can do to increase order completion and your conversion rates. In this post, we’ll cover one effective strategy — the shopping cart abandonment survey.

What’s an abandoned cart survey?

Abandoned cart surveys are questionnaires sent to people who left their cart and the items in it behind. The point of the survey is to find out why someone abandoned their cart and identify problem areas in the checkout process.

These are some of the most common issues you’ll uncover in an abandoned cart survey:

• The checkout process is confusing and time-consuming
• People be like nah with forced account creation
• Additional costs, like taxes and shipping, are too high
• Shoppers can’t see total costs upfront and don’t like the unpleasant surprise at checkout
• You’re not offering enough shipping options
• Shipping is too slow, and people don’t want to turn into skeletons waiting for their items

When you know why someone didn’t complete their purchase, you can identify problem areas that prevent people from checking out. Fix those problems, and you can increase conversion rates.

How to deliver your cart abandonment survey questions

There are a couple different ways to deliver an abandoned cart survey. You can serve up the questions on-site or through an email.

Abandoned cart on-site survey

You may also hear on-site abandoned cart surveys referred to as exit surveys. This form of abandoned cart survey is served to shoppers right as they’re about to leave the site without checking out.

On-site surveys are beneficial for a couple of reasons:

• People get asked why they’re so callously leaving their cart behind right as they do it
• Their reasons for abandonment are fresh in their minds
• You get a better chance at identifying problems with the specific checkout page or the exact part in the checkout process that’s leading to abandonment

On-site surveys allow shoppers to explain their reasoning because they can provide direct feedback to retailers at the point of abandonment. An exit survey can also give you a chance to help shoppers complete their purchases.

An abandoned cart email survey

An abandoned cart email series is another tool in your arsenal for increasing conversion rates. But diving into the series is beyond the scope of this article.

Instead, we’ll focus on abandoned cart survey emails, a vital part of the abandoned cart email series.

In this email, you simply offer a selection of reasons why the recipient won’t complete their purchase. The email survey gives a wealth of data on the biggest causes of friction in the checkout process that’s causing abandoned carts.

Top questions to include:

• Why didn’t you complete your purchase?
• What would have convinced you to complete your purchase?
• What was your biggest concern about purchasing from us?
• Do you have any questions before checking out?
• Is something preventing you from checking out?

You can structure the survey to offer a text-based answer, where people can plug in their exact reason for abandoning their cart. Or you can use a single-answer selection with common reasons why someone wouldn’t complete checkout.

If you use the second option, be sure to include another option that serves up a free-form response. Some of the common reasons you can offer for selection include:

• I found the item somewhere else, and it’s cheaper
• Shipping was too expensive
• I didn’t want to wait for shipping
• There were some technical issues
• I didn’t want to create an account
• Your site doesn’t seem secure
• The checkout process was confusing
• There weren’t enough payment options

Shopping Cart Abandonment Survey: Interpreting the data

There are different methods you can use to find out why people are leaving their shopping carts behind. You can use websites and user analytics. But the most accurate and quickest way to find out is by asking customers directly.

Once you know why people leave without buying, you can take the steps needed to reduce abandoned carts and boost your conversion rates.

Originally published at https://www.cartlyfts.com on May 8, 2021.