Cart abandonment is a reality: 3 of every 4 shoppers tend to leave items behind in their online cart. Potential customers walk away from your store for numerous reasons, including an unoptimized checkout strategy, which necessitates putting in place a cart abandonment strategy that wins them over and leads them to purchase abandoned items.

An appealing website, intuitive navigation, attractive products, and great prices are sure to draw online shoppers to your website. They will use the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform you set up, browse, and add products to their shopping cart.

So far, so good.

But chances are it may go downhill from there.

An analysis of as many as 41 studies has shown that 70% of customers will leave after adding an item to their cart. But those numbers pale in comparison to a Statista report that reveals that 88% of online shoppers abandon their carts.

This isn’t what you signed up for after spending on setting up Salesforce e-commerce, marketing, and growing visibility.

It is important to understand the customers’ psyche to learn why online shoppers abandon their shopping carts. The reasons could be numerous, including:

  • Mandatory account creation to check out
  • The inability to calculate total costs upfront
  • Conducting research to buy later
  • High additional costs such as taxes, shipping, and others
  • Inability to find coupons that lured them earlier
  • A complex, time-consuming checkout
  • Website performance issues
  • Slow/charged delivery and limited shipping options
  • Lack of payment methods
  • Security concerns overpayment
  • Disproportionate upselling
  • Better pricing from other e-commerce sites
  • Inadequate return policy
  • Lack of customer support

The reasons are plenty, but what is the way forward?

Business tycoon and philanthropist Bill Gates once famously said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Putting yourself in the customers’ shoes and doing a thorough analysis can offer incredible insight on how you can eliminate cart abandonment.

The key to significantly reduce the cart abandonment rate – and boost sales and revenue – is to continually optimize your online store to ensure the most delightful shopping experience and fix all leaks that are keeping shoppers from completing their purchase.

salesforce commerce cloud

Implementing the Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution can help tackle this problem and recover abandoned carts. Here’s how you can do it:

  1. Offer free shipping: Display any extra charges openly right from the start. Be it packaging, shipping, or taxes, ensure that your shoppers are aware of any additional charges so that there is no element of surprise during checkout. If possible, offer free shipping to increase customer satisfaction.
  2. Create a sense of urgency: Shoppers are motivated by limited period offers and discounts.  This can be achieved through a countdown timer displayed on every page.
  3. Use exit-intent popups: Prompt your shopper to confirm if they really intend on abandoning their cart with an exit-intent pop-up. Use the opportunity to offer a bigger discount or a chance to save their cart for the future.
  4. Target cart abandoners with scheduled emails: All is not lost when a customer abandons a cart. Use targeted marketing emails with more discounts or free shipping to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase. Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud go together and can be effectively used for targeted marketing through the marketing system integration feature.
  5. Cart merge: It is a Salesforce e-commerce feature that allows users to merge carts. For example, if your customer has added products to their cart without logging in and has some products which they added earlier under a registered user identity, they can simply merge the two carts by logging in once again.
  6. Wishlists and save for later lists are increasingly gaining popularity.
  7. Encourage customers to subscribe to a product by offering a good discount. This way the customer is happy and your upcoming sale are also definite.
  8. Some exclusive Salesforce Cloud Commerce hacks to prevent cart abandonment:
    • Basket persistence feature to allow shoppers to save their cart even though their session has timed out
    • Understanding the two types of customers, according to Salesforce Commerce Cloud
    • Registered customers (returning customers or customers with valid user-profiles )
    • Unregistered customers (new customers)
    • Configure and enable basket persistence and basket lifetime on Salesforce e-commerce for both registered and unregistered customers to save shopping carts. By default, the system clears the cart when the session times out.
    • Basket persistence allows customers to save and restore their baskets (or carts). However, if a customer with an active basket logs in, the system will not be able to restore the saved basket.
    • Basket lifetime for registered customers ranging anywhere between 30 and 365 days.
    • Basket lifetime for unregistered customers: The maximum value we can use here is seven; the cart is saved for seven days.

A 0% cart abandonment rate is a pipe dream. But you can bring this rate down significantly by retargeting abandoners and re-engaging with them to entice them to return to your online store and complete their purchase.

As a registered Salesforce Commerce Cloud partner, Aspire Systems has worked with many business owners trying to establish their presence in the difficult and overcrowded digital market. We can help you reclaim abandoners and reduce cart abandonment. To pick up your pace and mark your digital territory, talk to us today.

Recommended Blogs

1.Explore the Out-of-the-Box Features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud – Part 1: Customer Service Center

2.How Salesforce Commerce Cloud Can Hook Gen Z and Millennial Shoppers and Keep Them Coming Back for More

3. Six Reasons Why You Should Use Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Launch Your Global Stores