How to recover an abandoned cart in WooCommerce
One of the most important challenges of e-commerces is the abandoned cart. Although there will always be a percentage of lost sales, there are many non-invasive tools to recover the attention of the shoppers, taking them back to their carts and improve the conversion of your website.
Why users abandon their shopping cart?
Different studies show that around 70% of shoppers exit online stores with products in their cart. That’s a lot! But why does it happen? Unfortunately for eCommerce sites, most cart abandonments are hard to avoid because users browse different sites comparing prices, products, shipping options, and so on.
However, there are many other reasons for shoppers to abandon their carts that you can tackle:
- They are forced to create an account before making the purchase.
- The checkout is long and confusing.
- Aggressive upselling during the transaction.
- High or unexpected shipping costs.
- Better prices on other websites.
- Slow delivery.
- The website is too slow.
- Payment security issues.
- Unsatisfactory return policy.
- Lack of customer support.
Plugins for abandoned cart
There are many plugins to help you reduce abandoned carts. Here, we’ll list the best five as well as other tools to reduce it as much as possible.
Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce
This plugin is one of the most famous plugins for abandoned carts, allowing you to recover the orders that were one step from closing. It has some interesting features:
- You can set the cart abandoned cut-off time.
- It allows your customers to recover their carts with just one click.
- Captures abandoned guest carts in the checkout page if it happens after entering the email.
- You can set intervals to send reminders via email to customers, and the notifications can automatically stop when the customer makes a purchase. Besides, you can use templates, custom variables, and HTML in your emails.
- You can track the information of the abandoned products, the value of the abandoned cart and the value of the recovered orders.
This version is free.
When should you send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails? Data from Salecyle that you should send them as quickly as possible. The conversion rate on emails sent 24 hours later is ~50% lower than emails sent within an hour of an abandoned cart.
Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce
This Pro version has a lot of features like:
- An add to cart pop-up.
- Embed WooCommerce coupons and auto-apply discount codes when recovering abandoned carts.
- Track expired coupons.
- Track emails (opens, clicks, deleted).
- Send custom emails to specific abandoned carts.
- Restrict the abandoned carts based on the ‘Email address’, ‘IP address’ & ‘Domain name’.
- GDPR Ready.
- Send notifications to Facebook and Text.
- Capture emails from URL.
- Real-time email capture on the checkout page.
- Fully integrated with Aelia Currency Switcher for the WooCommerce plugin.
- WPML compatible email templates: the customers will receive abandoned cart email notifications in the language in which they abandoned the cart.
- Upcoming features: Sending push notifications for cart recovery and advanced reporting tools to display the statistics on the dashboard.
The pricing is up to $119.00.
YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
This plugin focus on making the recovery of the abandoned cart smoother for the client. Some of the features include:
- Unique checkout link sent via email to the shopper. So if the shopper had filled the checkout form, click on the unique link takes him to a prefilled checkout page
- It’s GDPR compliant and you can show it on the checkout page.
- It integrates well with automation marketing tools like Active Campaign and Campaign Monitor.
- Like the previous plugin mentioned, this plugin can automatically send follow-up emails to the shoppers.
- The plugin data is stored in its database table, so it doesn’t affect the page speed.
It’s free.
Retainful
This plugin lets you automatically send recovery emails when the cart is abandoned and the notifications will stop when the client makes the purchase (you can schedule every email).
There are some great features:
- With Retainful Premium plans, you can also capture the customer’s email when they add an item to the cart.
- You can also show the customer a pop-up when they try to leave the website. Retainful can help you drive repeat purchases by sending single-use, unique coupon codes for the next purchase.
- You can customize emails with a drag and drop visual email editor.
You can use this plugin for free or buy a premium version. The pricing of the premium is up to $5.75 per month.
CartBounty
This plugin helps you get customer data even if they don’t make the purchase. Look at the features of the basic version:
- Instantly capture WooCommerce checkout field data before submission to save abandoned carts.
- The “Remember checkout fields” function will allow your customers to refresh the checkout page after entering their information and walk around the page without losing previously entered data in the checkout form. This feature is enabled only for users who haven’t logged in.
- If a user is logged in, the shopping cart will be instantly captured as soon as an item is added to the cart. After this, the cart will be instantly updated if it is altered or an item is removed from the cart.
- You can enable Exit-Intent popup to offer to save unregistered user’s shopping cart for later. With the help of the Exit Intent Technology, you can capture even more abandoned carts by displaying a message including an email field that the customer can fill to save his shopping cart.
More tools and options for abandoned cart
WonderPush
This plugin lets you send unlimited web push notifications. You can use them to alert the users of new products, coupons, sales or an abandoned cart. Automate web push notifications based on user behavior. It’s GDPR compliant. WonderPush offers a 14-day free trial. After the trial period, you can send unlimited web push notifications for €1 per month plus €1 per 1000 subscribers. There are no limits to the number of web push notifications you can send. This plugin supports rich formats, automation, real-time analytics, and a segmentation engine.
Jilt
This email marketing tool lets you send lifecycle and transactional emails, segment your audience, measure and track the performance of your email strategy and customize that emails. You can use a 14-day trial and buy it by $29/month for up to 1,000 contacts.
Carthook
This tool lets you design a one-page checkout and control that process, the visitors can skip the cart page and land directly on the checkout page with their products pre-loaded.
Features:
- Integration with PayPal, PayPal Express, Stripe, Authorize.net, NMI and more.
- You can offer up to three separate upsell offers to every customer. The customer only has to click a button.
- Offer subscription-based products as an upsell after the initial purchase.
- Build custom funnels for each product.
- You can change the funnel priority and see real-time statistics.
How to reduce abandoned carts?
Improve the checkout page
The checkout page is one of the most important steps of the purchase process so you could remove checkout fields to simplify it or edit them to increase conversion. There are also some great WooCommerce plugins that you can try to improve the checkout page.
Capture visitors’ emails
The harsh truth about eCommerce is that 95% (or more) of your visitors won’t buy from you. However, if you can capture their email addresses you can promote your business, send offers and discounts to increase conversions. You can do this by setting up different types of coupon codes, use exit-intent pop-ups, forms, and so on. To learn more about how to capture visitors’ emails check out this guide.
Strengthen your ads strategy
If you have an ads strategy on a platform like Facebook, install the Facebook Pixel on your website and it will help you segment the ads based on the behavior of the user. You can also use that information for your Google Ads strategy and keyword planning.
Incorporate an online chat
With an online chat, you can solve any doubt that the shopper has before the checkout. You can also add an FAQ page or a chatbot with information from the FAQ.
Make clear all added expenses
Shoppers hate hidden costs so show from the beginning the total price including all the taxes. Additionally, make clear what the exact shipping costs are.
Audit the purchase process
Review the purchase process and make sure it’s smooth, easy, and reliable. If it’s not, change it and optimize it. You could also use tools like Google Analytics to see in which step the users are dropping.
Use copywriting
Strive to create product sheets that give all the information a person needs to buy, and use the copywriting to persuade and convince the shopper about the benefits of the product.
Add testimonials
Testimonials are an excellent way to build trust among users so you could add reviews and some type of social proof to the products.
Abandoned cart – Conclusion
To sum up, abandoned carts are one of the main challenges that eCommerce sites face. However, the good news is that there are several things you can do to reduce it as much as possible. For this, your checkout page must be optimized, there shouldn’t be hidden or unexpected costs that scare users away, you should integrate your store with trustworthy payment gateways such as PayPal or Stripe, and you should have a good return policy in place. All this will help you make your shoppers more secure and improve abandoned carts.
Are you ready to tackle this issue and make more sales? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!