Chemi Katz, CEO and co-founder, Namogoo
Ecommerce retailers invest immense resources into building seamless, engaging customer journeys, only to see an estimated 75 percent of those journeys end right before the finish line as shoppers abandon their carts.
Cart abandonment cost online merchants $4.6 trillion in 2016, according to a Business Insider Intelligence analysis. But here’s the bright spot: The analysis also found that about 60 percent of that lost revenue was actually recoverable for retailers.
Winning back that revenue through discounts, promotions, and timely re-engagements may seem like an obvious solution—but the truth is, most shoppers will actually abandon their carts not because of sticker shock or cold feet, but due to technical problems on a retailer’s website.
The payment page may crash. Payment options may not appear on customers’ screens. Unauthorized infiltrators may redirect customers to another website. Or similar glitches.
Is your website immune? It may actually be more vulnerable than you think, given that some of the biggest culprits behind cart abandonment are often hidden. The good news: They’re hiding in plain sight—which means that with proper attention to key vulnerabilities, retailers can curb cart abandonment and see the return on their investments in customer journey spike.
Here are five little-known reasons your customers may be abandoning their carts.
1. Mobile-Incompatible Payment Pages
Mobile accounts for a growing share of ecommerce sales, with forecasters projecting that 53.9 percent of sales will come from mobile in 2021, up from 44.7 percent in 2019.
Accordingly, merchants have devoted ample time and resources to making their ecommerce websites mobile-friendly. But it’s vital to ensure that your website’s mobile compatibility extends to the payment page—which isn’t necessarily a given.
Payment pages are usually opened in iFrame, which may not be mobile-responsive like the rest of your website. By ensuring that your iFrame is mobile-integrated, you’ll provide a seamless path to checkout for mobile shoppers.
2. No SSL Handshake
The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) provides a mechanism for encrypting your web connection. To comply with the Payments Card Industry (PCI) standards, you need an SSL certificate or “handshake,” which keeps sensitive information like credit card numbers secure.
Without an SSL handshake between the browser and server hosting a website, payment will fail. In fact, most ecommerce websites will use third party payment providers. Payment providers are required to have an SSL certificate and most will require their customers to have one as well. However, if an ecommerce website’s SSL certificate expires then the SSL handshake will break and visitors will not be able to process their payment.
It is imperative to maintain a valid and updated SSL certificate to make sure your customers are able to make payments on your website.
3. Customer Journey Hijacking
Online journey hijacking is a devious practice whereby malware sitting on a user’s computer entices them to click on unauthorized product ads and links which seem to be part of an ecommerce site… but are not. These users are “hijacked” from the original site to others—leaving 5% of revenue on the table. What’s worse: since the malware is on the user’s device, online retailers have no idea.
According to Namogoo research, 15 to 25 percent of all web sessions are “hijacked” by the injection of unauthorized ads and promotions—with up to 70 percent of those cases involving ads that redirect ecommerce shoppers to competitor websites. When those ads redirect shoppers to lower-priced deals, many shoppers abandon their carts.
Retailers are losing out on between 2 to 5 percent of annual revenue due to online journey hijacking, and until the problem is brought to the forefront and stakeholders commit to combating it, retailers will see high-value customers slip away.
The incentive for getting a handle on the issue is strong: Namogoo’s findings reveal that the users exposed to unauthorized ads actually convert at higher rates than non-infected users, indicating that thwarting online journey hijackers will return high-intent shoppers to retailers’ customer funnels.
4. Single Path to Conversion
Beyond a certain point, the customer journey converges into a single path to purchase, typically somewhere in the shopping cart.
The key is to ensure that you don’t stop upselling customers too early—or continue upselling too late. Finding the sweet spot after which no upselling should occur can dramatically impact sales—yet few ecommerce stakeholders devote sufficient attention to the issue.
That sweet spot will vary from industry to industry—travel merchants will tend to upsell customers virtually until the very end, for instance—and it’s essential to conduct testing to pinpoint the sweet spot for your own website.
5. Cart and Checkout Localization
Culture, consumer expectations, and user behavior varies from place to place. Naturally, so can cart abandonment rates.
While generally consistent, research suggests there are notable differences between regions. In a global study, SaleCycle found that the cart abandonment rate in North America was 74 percent while the rate for Europe was 70.9 percent. And while the data found that cart abandonment was highest in the Asia-Pacific region, at 76.3 percent, shoppers in the region have generally been found to be less likely to abandon their carts due to shipping costs.
By testing different strategies on a regional basis, retailers will be better positioned to serve their customers’ needs—and keep them in the customer funnel.
Namogoo’s technology prevents unauthorized ads from diverting website visitors to other websites.