WooCommerce cart abandonment can happen for any number of reasons and regardless of them, the bottom line is the same — you’re losing potential sales when they do.
Fortunately, there are solutions. With some strategic effort, you can recover some of the sales from customers who ditched their carts and didn’t go through with their purchases. In this article, we’ll discuss the main reasons why people abandoned their cards and give you suggestions on how to tackle them. Adhering to those best practices will help recover sales that otherwise may have been lost and increase your revenue.
Send WooCommerce cart abandonment emails with ease using Omnisend’s pre-built automation workflows
There are several reasons why potential customers abandon their shopping carts, including:
Unexpected costs: When costs aren’t clearly displayed upfront, customers may abandon their carts. So ensure fees such as shipping and taxes are shown early in the checkout process to eliminate negative feelings that can arise from hidden costs.
Complicated checkout process: If your checkout process is lengthy or complicated, customers may abandon their carts before they finish making a purchase. Make it simple for customers to buy what’s in their cart if you want to avoid cart abandonment.
Lack of trust: If customers have concerns about payment security or your site’s credibility, they are less likely to complete their transactions. Make sure your store has security features and a professional appearance so customers feel confident buying from you.
Technical issues: A store that has technical issues with loading times, broken links, or crashes during checkout can quickly cause shopping cart abandonment. Optimize your site and update it frequently to keep it working well and ensure it’s user-friendly.
Limited payment options: Many customers have a preferred payment method, and by not offering a variety of payment options, you may deter customers from completing their orders. Offer options like PayPal, Stripe, and different credit cards allow your customers to choose how they pay for their orders.
High shipping costs or long delivery times: Some customers may abandon their carts if they feel shipping fees are too high or delivery times are overly long. Try offering free or low-cost shipping and work with shipping companies to get faster delivery schedules.
No clear return policy: Your return policy needs to be easy to find on your site, and you should reiterate it during the checkout process. Customers want to feel confident that they have the option to return something if they aren’t satisfied with the purchase.
Price comparison: Customers often add items to their carts and then compare prices with other websites. If they find a lower price with a competitor, they’ll purchase the items from them, abandoning their cart on your store.
Unavailability of discounts: Customers want to feel like they’re getting a good deal, and if you don’t offer coupon codes or discounts, customers could abandon their carts for sites that have special offers. You can provide promotions and make your store more attractive by giving customers the chance to save.
Mobile optimization: Many customers shop online from their mobile devices, so a website that isn’t mobile-friendly is likely going to miss potential sales and customers. You want your site to be easy to use and navigate on a mobile device so customers don’t abandon their carts to shop somewhere else.
Distractions: If your site has pop-ups, annoying advertisements, or other distractions, your customers might leave before completing their purchase. These can also slow your site down, further pushing customers away.
As you can see, WooCommerce cart abandonment happens for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at strategies that can help you recapture lost sales and what you can do to prevent or reduce your WooCommerce cart abandonment rate.
Learn the essentials
Stop leaving money on the table. Your emails can win back customers and grow revenue. Learn the essential messages that attract and retain customers, and stand out from the competition.
WooCommerce cart abandonment: strategies & best practices
No ecommerce store wants to miss out on potential sales and knowing the strategies and best practices for preventing WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment can help to reduce these instances. Here are some specific tactics you can employ to increase your WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery:
1. Use WooCommerce cart abandonment emails
Follow-up emails: Setting up an automated email campaign reminds your customers of the items they abandoned in their carts. In these emails, you can offer discounts or other incentives to get customers to complete their purchase.
Personalization: Personalize cart abandonment emails by addressing customers using their names and reminding them of the specific items they left in their cart. This helps customers feel connected to your store and lets them know you care.
2. Optimize the checkout process
Guest checkout option: Provide customers the option to create a guest account or to checkout without having to fill in too many personal details. This can make the checkout process smoother, reducing cart abandonment.
Auto-fill forms: With auto-fill features for forms on your site, you can speed up the checkout process and minimize errors. When checking out is simple, customers are less likely to abandon their carts.
3. Transparent pricing
Upfront costs: Avoid waiting to show customers how much shipping will cost or having any hidden fees during checkout, as unpleasant surprises can deter customers from finalizing their orders.
Free shipping offers: Customers increasingly expect free shipping as a standard offering from online retailers. Roll the cost of shipping into the price of your offerings to increase the perceived value of the purchase, and reduce buyer hesitation.
4. Improve trust and security
Trust badges and SSL certificates: Trust badges and SSL certificates reassure customers their payment information is secure and that your site is credible. Having these features helps customers feel confident in your store so they continue with their purchase.
Clear return policies: Return policies are important to many customers, as they trust sites more if they know they can send items back if there’s an issue. Make sure you have a return policy and that your customers know what it is and how to find it.
5. Enhance user experience
Mobile optimization: Ensure your WooCommerce site is fully optimized for mobile devices because a poor mobile experience can lead to higher cart abandonment rates. With so many people shopping from their phones, you don’t want to lose sales because your site doesn’t work on a phone.
Fast load times: A speedy site is essential for today’s busy shoppers. If your site takes too long to load, your customers are likely to abandon their carts and move on with their day.
6. Offer multiple payment options
Diverse payment methods: To ensure you offer the payment options your customers prefer, explore the various payment methods available and select those that best suit your target audience.
Accept multiple currencies: If you want to sell to customers in other countries to expand your market reach, make sure your site is set up to accept and convert foreign currencies.
7. Implement exit-intent popups
Special offers: Exit-intent popups that offer discounts or special promotions are key to getting customers who are about to leave your site without completing their purchase to stay and finish the process.
Survey popups: Asking customers why they’re leaving their cart without finishing their purchase is an excellent way to get feedback and valuable insights into why customers abandon their carts. Use the information from surveys to improve the checkout process.
8. Customer support and live chat
Real-time assistance: To assist customers and help make the checkout process smooth, offer live support to help resolve issues or concerns. This ensures customers who are struggling to complete their purchase get the help they need.
Simplify the checkout steps: Reduce the number of steps required to complete a purchase and provide an intuitive and user-friendly experience at checkout.
Best WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery plugins
For many WooCommerce merchants, the built-in cart abandonment feature is too limited.
Thankfully, there are great plugins that can help you recover more abandoned shopping carts. We’ve rounded up five best WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery plugins that vastly expand on the default feature for WooCommerce sites.
1. Omnisend
Image via Omnisend
Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation plugin that helps ecommerce businesses grow their sales. By adding Omnisend to your marketing arsenal, you’re better equipping yourself (and your team) to nurture your brand’s relationship with your customer base via WooCommerce follow-up emails, SMS, push notifications, and more.
When you combine Omnisend’s omnichannel features with its pre-built automations, you have the winning recipe for re-engaging customers after they’ve abandoned their ecommerce shopping cart — and well before and after. Omnisend’s email templates make it easy to craft any lifecycle email, including post-purchase emails, welcome emails, lapsed-purchaser emails, standard promotional campaigns, and more.
Retainful is a simple tool that automatically sends recovery cart recovery emails to customers in a specified time sequence until they complete their order. The plugin lets you create cart recovery automations with a drag-and-drop editor, as well as track your abandoned or recovered carts alongside revenue in real time.
With Retainful, you can motivate your customers to buy using add-to-cart popups, exit intent popups, or a countdown timer. The tool easily integrates with WooCommerce, as well as other email marketing platforms.
The WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery plugin by Addify can help boost your sales by tracking the performance of your email templates so you know which ones work and which don’t. It also enables recovery emails for abandoned carts on your WooCommerce store to encourage visitors to complete their purchases. This little plugin also offers lots of customization options so you can personalize your WooCommerce cart abandonment emails to your customers and guests.
You can easily maintain a list of abandoned carts, recovered carts, and pending carts with details about each one. This will help you analyze shopper data for better audience targeting and allow you to avoid having too many abandoned carts on your site.
OptinMonster’s exit-intent technology triggers popups with special personalized offers when customers are about to leave your site. This helps entice them to complete their purchase, as customized offers appeal to customers, leading to increased conversion rates.There’s also an A/B testing feature for this plugin, so you can track your cart abandonment campaigns to learn what works best.
Integrating OptinMonster with your WooCommerce store is a straightforward process and the plugin uses a drag-and-drop builder, which means no coding is required to create your popups.
If you want a social proof tool that displays real-time purchase notifications to build trust and encourage conversions, then check out TrustPulse. With this plugin for your WooCommerce store, you can leverage social proof tools and get visitors on your site to take action. When people see their peers trust your site, they feel more confident making a purchase themselves. TrustPulse provides data to prove to your customers that people trust you, so they should too.
Using TrustPulse can lead to higher conversions because you’re able to target customers by showing them the social proof they need to see to push them in the right direction. You’ll also get real-time tracking data to keep you up to date on customer activity as soon as it happens.
Pricing
Basic: $5/month
Plus: $10/month
Pro: $19/month
Growth: $39/month
Recovering WooCommerce abandoned carts with Omnisend
Omnisend is the magic bullet for WooCommerce cart abandonment issues because it synchronizes directly with your WooCommerce store data. This allows you to automate every stage of the customer journey — including abandoned carts.
By integrating Omnisend with your WooCommerce store, you’ll unlock the power of Omnisend’s marketing automation workflows. When WooCommerce detects that a shopper abandons their cart, Omnisend can automatically send an email reminder with a link to the checkout page to encourage them to return to their purchase.
And because Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing platform, you’re not limited to just sending a WooCommerce abandoned cart email. You can also make effective use of abandoned cart SMS and web push notifications to help get customers back to your site.
There are many examples of how to send push notifications to recover abandoned carts. For instance, you could use an engagement notification that encourages someone to interact with your app or go to your website. Or use an individual’s past behavior and send a notification based on what you know they like — referred to as behavioral push notifications.
Omnisend customer Amundsen Sports has nearly one in three customers click on an order confirmation email and make another purchase. Omnisend’s direct integration with WooCommerce powers the automation and gives Amundsen greater freedom.
Synchronizing WooCommerce with Ominsend takes just four simple steps:
Register an Omnisend account
Select the Plugins tab on your WordPress dashboard
Search for the “Omnisend for WooCommerce” plugin and install it
Link your Omnisend account with the WooCommerce plugin
You can find a more in-depth guide to the setup process of integrating Omnisend with WooCommerce on our knowledge base. This article has a complete guide to walk you through the process step by step.
Once installed and integrated with your WooCommerce store, Omnisend automatically syncs all your store’s data — including details about your products, contacts, and orders. Depending on the size of your store, this can take up to 24 hours, but usually, it only takes a few hours to synchronize everything.
How to set up a WooCommerce abandoned cart workflow on Omnisend
Before you can create your abandoned cart workflow, you’ll need to verify your sender’s email address. To do this:
Log into your Omnisend account
Locate the Automations tab in your dashboard
Click the New workflow option
Check Cart Abandonment
Then click the Customize workflow button
Omnisend has a range of abandoned cart recovery email templates to help you get started. You can also retarget cart abandoners via Google and Facebook ads.
Start by creating a segment of abandoners for your abandoned cart retargeting campaigns based on shopping behavior, campaign engagement, and more.
Once you’ve created and saved an audience segment for customers who abandoned their carts, you can sync it to a Facebook Custom Audience or Google Ads Customer Match. Now, the segment will automatically update, so you don’t have to add cart abandoners manually. This means you’ll always have a fully updated, real-time list of cart abandoners to work with at the convenience at your fingertips.
Examples of best incentives for WooCommerce cart abandonment
There are multiple incentives you could use to increase the success of your WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery campaigns. And because shoppers abandon their carts for many reasons, we’ll take a look at several solutions you can try to directly address cart abandonment issues on your WooCommerce site:
1. Discount coupons
Who doesn’t love getting a great deal? To encourage your customers to complete their purchases, consider offering discounts, such as a percentage or fixed amount off their total purchase.
Example: Send customers an email with a coupon code offering 10% off if they spend a certain amount by a specified date.
Free shipping, a highly attractive incentive for many shoppers, can be the final push that gets customers to complete their purchases. You may have to get creative with how you can make this happen, but an offer of free shipping can significantly reduce cart abandonment issues.
Example: Consider sending an email offering free shipping for orders that meet a minimum purchase amount.
Image via Canva
3. Limited-time offers
Creating a sense of urgency can motivate customers to move quickly in making a purchase. With limited-time offer emails, you can prompt customers to act on their desire to buy to avoid missing out on a good deal.
Example: Notify customers of a flash sale they can take advantage of for 24 hours, offering them special discounts on items in their cart for a limited time only.
Image via Canva
4. Bundle deals
Offering customers a discount if they purchase multiple items together can be a way to incentivize them to buy the items in their cart, and it also increases sales volume for your WooCommerce store.
Example: Send your customers an email with a deal where bundling a purchase of more than one item gets them another item for free or at a discount. Additionally you can include “related products” display on your store, to make shopping for bundle deals easier.
Image via Canva
5. Loyalty points
By offering your customers loyalty points for items they buy, you can encourage them to come back and use those points on future purchases, essentially increasing repeat business.
Example: Send customers a digital loyalty card for completing a purchase today that provides a discount after they make a specified number of purchases from your store.
Image via Canva
6. Personalized offers
Tailoring offers to individual customers based on their browsing and purchase history personalizes the deal and makes your customers feel special and important.
Example: Send customers an email with a discount on items they’ve viewed recently or added to their carts before.
Image via Canva
7. Exit-intent popups
Using popups to display special offers when a customer is about to exit your site can recapture their attention and persuade them to stay to finish making a purchase.
Example: Show an exit-intent popup with a special discount as a customer attempts to leave your site, enticing them to continue shopping or complete their purchase. You can pair this with an SMS message to further remind your customers they have items in their cart.
Final thoughts on WooCommerce cart abandonment
You don’t have to accept WooCommerce cart abandonment as an inevitable part of doing business. Instead, use cart abandonment plugins and marketing campaigns that help recover abandoned carts and keep your customers interested in your offerings and engaged with your store. Omnisend has the solutions to your cart abandonment woes, and we’re here to help you recover those lost shopping carts and convert them into sales.
Sell more with your emails & worry less
Get better email & SMS marketing made for WooCommerce for 30% OFF + a FREE migration package valued at $1,000
Use these answers to frequently asked questions about WooCommerce cart abandonment so you can avoid this troublesome problem:
Does WooCommerce have abandoned cart recovery?
WooCommerce doesn’t have a built-in abandoned cart recovery feature. However, there are many plugins and extensions you can get that assist you with recovering carts that get left behind.
What is the abandonment rate for WooCommerce carts?
Depending on the industry, WooCommerce reports that there is a 55% to 80% abandoned cart rate. This is a significant percentage of lost opportunity you don’t want to miss out on.
How to send abandoned cart emails in WooCommerce?
Automate your abandoned cart emails in WooCommerce with plugins from Omnisend and other sites that specialize in marketing campaigns for your store.
How do I reduce abandoned carts in WooCommerce?
To reduce the abandoned cart rate in your WooCommerce store, take advantage of plugins that help you entice customers to make a purchase, remind people of their abandoned carts, and provide offers and incentives that encourage them to come back to buy what’s in their cart.
Karolina is a content project manager and team lead at Omnisend, where she blends creative strategy with a keen focus on competitive intelligence. Outside of work, Karolina finds balance through her love of gardening, exploring new hiking trails, biking, and raising a bunch of boys.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Subscribe and don’t miss any updates!
No fluff, no spam, no corporate filler. Just a friendly letter, twice a month.
Omnisend AI
OFFER
