Here’s how to Recover WooCommerce Abandoned Carts [Tools & Strategies]

Running a store on an eCommerce WordPress theme and losing sales because customers walk away mid-purchase?

Yep, we’re talking about WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment. It’s a problem that every seller faces, so you need to know ways to reduce it. This means targeting the most common reasons why eCommerce customers decide to leave without buying.

In this post, you’ll find these reasons, along with five proven ways and tools to recover WooCommerce abandoned carts.

Why Do Customers Abandon eCommerce Shopping Carts?

eCommerce studies show a number of common reasons why people stop mid-purchase. Knowing them will help you to focus on your effort and recover more sales.

Baymard Institute, for example, named these ten reasons for cart abandonment.

These reasons suggest a few issues for eCommerce sellers to work on:

• A lack of trust
• Complex checkout processes
• Unexpected costs.

Fixing or reducing the impact of these issues is a good first step to reduce digital shopping cart abandonment and increase sales. That’s why online sellers simplify checkouts and even use strategies like SMS marketing to recover sales.

So how could you reduce WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment effectively, too? Look no further, five great techniques are coming up next.

How to Recover WooCommerce Abandoned Carts

Here are five proven ways to recover more sales on your WooCommerce store.

1. Display Order Costs before Checkout

Unexpected costs.

This is the single most important reason why people leave without buying.

To avoid losing sales because of cost surprises, WooCommerce shops need to show shipping estimates before a customer reaches checkout.

Fortunately, there are WordPress plugins you can use to calculate and display shipping and taxes – those dreaded additional costs – on pricing or product description pages.

Some of the best ones are:

• Table Rate Shipping [free plan available] – calculates shipping costs based on country, product weight, and prices
• Tax Jar [free plan available] – provides accurate tax information on WooCommerce stores.

These plugins allow your customers to know additional costs right away, so they won’t encounter any frustrating surprises on the checkout page. In fact, here’s how these costs can be displayed (shipping and tax).

The customer sees the sales tax right away, and calculates the shipping cost by clicking a special button.

Source: Author’s screenshot, Canxvasetc.com

Add these plugins to your WooCommerce store to have a similar form on product pages. This will help reduce the number of abandoned orders.

In some cases, tax and shipping information might be unavailable because of ever-changing regulations and delivery charges. Consider installing a WordPress live chat plugin to allow customers to receive answers from support quickly.

2. Use a WordPress Chatbot

A WordPress chatbot plugin can send reminders about an abandoned shopping cart and encourage you to finish the purchase. If a customer leaves the checkout page and goes to other pages, the chatbot will send a message like this.

A WordPress chatbot in action

A chatbot can also send reminders to returning visitors. If a customer left a product in the shopping cart and returned to your WooCommerce store after some time, it can recognize that. The next time that customer visits your store, they will see a message reminding them about the item in the cart.

In general, to encourage completing online purchases, the chatbot can send one more shopping cart reminder or a discount – the choice is yours.

Such versatility and customization of chatbots give WooCommerce store owners more opportunities to recover sales.

3. Enable Guest Checkout

As Baymard found, 28% of abandoned shopping carts occur because of the mandatory requirement to create an account. That’s a lot of money to leave on the table.

Guest checkout is a way to fix this problem.

It’s a feature that allows buying online without creating or logging in to an account, so the website doesn’t store any information. Guest checkout is an easier and faster way to make purchases, so many people choose it.

Activate the guest checkout option in WooCommerce settings by checking an appropriate box. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts and Privacy and find the “Guest checkout” section. There, you’ll find two checkboxes (see the image below).

Tick the first checkbox to activate guest checkout.

Source: WooCommerce.com

After this, your checkout will have two options to place an order – as a guest and a new customer. Use A/B testing to see how popular guest checkout is – if more people choose it, consider adding more payment options.

4. Put Customer Reviews on Checkout

Any digital marketing consultant will tell you that customer reviews increase trust and motivation to buy. Having them on the checkout page is like placing a trust badge that reduces doubts customers might have about buying.

But how to add them there? Like with everything, WordPress has a plugin for that.

With a customer review plugin like Customer Reviews, you can put a slider with testimonials on any page. Adding it to the checkout can help increase the trust and confidence of customers.

Source: WordPress.org, Customer Reviews plugin

Pick your best reviews and display them on checkout. This way, you’ll help more customers to get over their hesitations and show that your store is a trustworthy place to buy.

You can also take it one step ahead and gather more detailed information from your customers using an online survey about your products.

A survey not only helps your business with potential testimonials but also provides invaluable information about your products and how to better them. You can use a free online survey maker, such as JotForm to start collecting information from your customers easily!

Try to pick recent and relevant reviews to your customers for the checkout. It’s the best way to demonstrate that you provide high quality and level of service.

5. Send WooCommerce Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails

An abandoned shopping cart email campaign can serve as an additional reminder to finish the purchase after the customer leaves your store. Many WooCommerce shops use them to encourage customers to return, and yours shouldn’t be an exception.

The average conversion rate of abandoned shopping cart email campaigns is almost 19%. That’s a nice share of recovered sales that might bring a lot of revenues that could be lost because of a lack of recovery effort.

So, try adding cart recovery emails to your list of existing email newsletter templates. Shopping cart recovery emails look something like this. It’s a simple email asking the customer if they’re sure about leaving a product behind – a good technique to make them think.

Like promotional email examples, shopping cart recovery messages can also contain similar products and discounts. They could work in case a customer changed their mind about that particular product and needed to see more.

By including more products in abandoned shopping cart email campaigns, WooCommerce shops try to find ways to make their offers more attractive to customers. You should try that, too.

Summary

Although there’s no way to avoid digital shopping cart abandonment, recovering many sales is certainly possible. If you’ve made it this far in this article, you understand why your customers might abandon WooCommerce cart and how to fix it.

If you follow these five strategies, you should convince many customers to return to your store and finish their shopping. Keep in mind that your store must have at least a few ways to battle WooCommerce cart abandonment. This way, you’ll be able to recover many sales!