On Ecommerce websites, an Abandoned Cart is created when items are added to the cart, and then it doesn’t get converted to a successful order.
When a user comes to your online shop, he either checks the items, makes a wishlist or adds items to the cart. If for any reason, the user decides not to purchase the items and leaves the website, leaving behind the items, then the cart becomes an Abandoned Cart.
There are many reasons why shopping carts are abandoned. A few of these reasons are listed below:
- Customers become shocked by the price spike when shipping and taxes are included in the total
- Merchant does not provide customer with guest checkout
- Merchant does not provide a wide range of shipping options
- Making checkout a tiresome process. Customers are impatient to fill a long form.
- Not offering free shipping.
There are many more reasons for carts being abandoned. We will look at that in a separate post.
Abandoned Carts can be broadly categorized into the following depending on the information that is captured for each abandoned cart:
Abandoned Cart by Visitor
When a non-registered customer comes to the store and add items to the cart but does not provide any of his details like first name, last name and email address. We can call such customer as a Visitor user.
Abandoned Cart by Guest
When a non-registered customer comes to the store and add items to the cart and also provides his details like first name, last name and/or email address, we can call such customer as a Guest user. Guest user is a Visitor until then fill in any of their personal details. So visitor abandoned carts get converted to guest abandoned carts.
Abandoned Cart by Registered User
When a registered customer logs into the site and makes no purchase after adding items to the cart, then the cart which is abandoned by him is termed as ‘Abandoned Cart by Registered User’. Since the customer is a registered user & has already logged-in, the site would already have their information like first name, last name, email address, etc which were captured during registration.
This is what typically an Abandoned Cart is all about. Thus merchants have to focus on how to achieve 100% conversion of viewers to buyers and how to retrieve lost customers. That’s where Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce Plugin comes into play for WooCommerce store owners.
Image source: https://www.ometria.com/blog/browse-abandonment-emails