Cart Abandonment Rate

High Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR) is one of the biggest drains on your profitability. Your marketing team is working super-hard to drive traffic to your site. However, when it comes to matching anonymous visitors with a product of interest, having them add a product to the cart – it’s a whole another level of challenges. And then, after all of that hard work and expense having visitor(s) abandon the online cart is very frustrating.

That’s why it is the imperative to continually monitor fluctuations of the cart abandonment rate and proactively take actions to reduce it.

How is cart abandonment rate tracked and calculated?

With Checkout Zen™, an application that natively integrates into eCommerce platforms, our goal is to introduce uniform data tracking across all client sites of visits that have at least one product in online shopping carts. This avoids inconsistencies of conventional web analytics solutions, like Google Analytics and others, where merchants need to custom tag online cart events. As results we are able to benchmark KPIs across all merchant sites and score the performance of the individual eCommerce sites.

Cart abandonment rate is all about the state of the top of your checkout funnel. It represents a ratio between number of visits (sessions) that abandoned the online shopping cart and total number of sessions with online shopping carts.

The following is a simple formula that explains how this metric is calculated:

What you can analyze and learn about your cart abandonment rate?

Checkout Zen™ is an easy to use checkout analytics app for your eCommerce site that enables you to detect trends and anomalies of this metric together with the ability to action those findings to improve your own results.

Trend Analysis

eCommerce metrics fluctuate, often in very significant way, during different day parts, days in week, weeks in the month, and months in the year. Therefore, it is essential to always consider the time varying behavior of the results in addition to the most recent reading.

Device Analysis

Cart abandonment rate is different for visitors using different web enabled devices. Interpretation of these results creates two sided picture. On one side a device form factor can be used as a proxy attribute for the audience type. On the other side a significantly higher cart abandonment rate on a particular device can also be indicator of poor checkout experience on such device.

New vs. Returning Visitor Analysis

Behavior of new site visitors tends to be different from the behavior of the returning visitors. New visitors in general are more sensitive to nuances of onsite experience than returning visitors. The ultimate goal is to minimize cart abandonment rate for the new visitors.

Channel Analysis

Cart abandonment rate is significantly impacted by the quality of visitor traffic, i.e. product-visitor fit. Channel analysis enables comparisons of the cart abandonment rate across main marketing channels and it can help business executives and marketing team members more effectively allocated marketing spend.

Sources Analysis

Traffic source analysis of the cart abandonment rate increases the resolution of the more general channel analysis into detail sources of the web traffic. Similar to channel analysis the results of sources analysis are essential tools for more effective management of the marketing spend.

Exit Page Analysis

Knowledge about where shoppers are exiting the site helps with better understanding of what causes high cart abandonment rate. For example those who are leaving site on home or category pages, i.e. exit points at the top of the sales funnel, are most likely leaving because they did not commit to purchase yet. Those who abandon carts at the bottom of the checkout are most likely frustrated with the checkout experience.

NOTE: The following is the formula behind the cart abandonment rate analysis by exit page template:

Multi-Attribute Analysis

Checkout Zen™ charts enable a multi-attribute filtering and deep data analysis for cart abandonment rate.

NEXT: Read about Checkout Engagement Rate (CER)