Abandoned Carts

What's a normal rate and how can I reduce it?

[pdivi]

I sell a category of mid-priced (mid $XX to low $XXX) products, targeted at males ages 16-24. The site just went live a couple of weeks ago and I'm just starting to get a feel for the rate of cart abandonment. It's higher than I would have expected. Can anyone share some insight on whether these rates are normal, and any ideas to help reduce them?

It's important to note that shipping is free, so there are no surprises at checkout.

Assume we start with 100 shoppers adding products to their cart. Here is how shoppers shake-out of my process:
Step 1. Add products to the shopping cart (100 shoppers)
Step 2. Fill out shipping/contact info. Normal stuff -- name, address, email. (20 shoppers remain)
Step 3. Submit credit card info. Card no., billing address. (10 shoppers remain)

Only 10% of those selecting products actually buy them. Seems abnormal. Is it?

[quiet_man]

Actually 10% seems quite high to me. There have been several threads here on this and similar issues. (Tip: use Google to search for "webmasterworld+yoursubject")

From the Library of this forum:
Shopping Cart Abandonment [webmasterworld.com]

See also:
What percentage of visitors actually put something in a shopping cart? [webmasterworld.com]

If you are looking for tips to improve conversions, the Content, Writing and Copyright forum has a number of useful threads listed in its Library:

Increasing Your Conversion Rate [webmasterworld.com]

Copy That Sells [webmasterworld.com]

[Rugles]

>>>>Add products to the shopping cart (100 shoppers)

All it takes is a couple of competitors testing your site to jack up your abandoned cart rate.

Unless you suspect that there is something broken on your site, don't get to hung up on abandoned carts.

[Lord Majestic]

Only 10% of those selecting products actually buy them. Seems abnormal. Is it?

It depends on lots of variables, but in principle your figure is not that low. Generally when I used to look into drop off rates for checkout at work (two major UK B2C sites), then I choosed the starting point as the first page of the actual checkout process, which would exlude basket activities.

Why? Because some people like just clicking on add to basket to compare things, its not supermarket so its easy to add/remove stuff. Add to this that sometimes (or often!) marketing people like that "call to action" link that adds product to basket and insisting on removal of other links (like to info pages) from emails or even front pages. Personally I consider that people had an intention to purchase only when they click "Checkout" on basket page.

So, even with more favourable starting point I noticed drop off rates of 75-85% (ie 25-15% customers reached final confirmation page). This may sound low, but it seems to be pretty typical - think of it as opportunity to increase your sales without increasing other costs than time/money spent on detailed analysis of your checkout process. We found that optimisation in this area does pay back well.