Hey guys,
Happy New Year!
Hope you had a blast, drank some water with your alcohol to avoid that nasty hangover in the morning!
If you hadn’t and you woke up and feel like someone is hammering into your brain, at least we hope you had the chance to kiss someone at midnight, to embark on the 2017 journey!
2016, especially Black Friday and the whole Christmas season, has been a blast for ecommerce (especially on mobile, where it has surpassed desktop for the first time in five years!): booming sales, great content to deliver and overall – great revenue.
But there is one problem that always persists, and that is Cart Abandonment.
To those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, Cart Abandonment is the same as leaving a cart full of groceries in the supermarket, going to the parking lot and driving home.
This means that ecommerce websites, whom woo as many customers as possible, find themselves with people filling their carts and leaving in the middle of the purchasing process.
Where?
Reasons vary: Most leave because of unexpected shipping costs revealed at the till, the second reason people leave is because they needed to open an account, a problem easily handled by offering customers the possibility of continuing as “guests”:
image courtesy of jomashop.com
Some leave because they found a better price at a competitor’s website, some are concerned with security and credit card fraud and some couldn’t find a coupon.
How bad is it?
According to salescycle.com, 75% of all clients abandon their carts halfway through the process.
Let’s engage in some stats to clarify the picture and see what we can do to improve our next sales cycles:
SMS Remarketing
According to a study conducted by salescycle.com, SMS has an average CTR of 36% in comparison to 3.2% for emails with a 98% open rate, with 90% of those (88.2%) are opened within three minutes:
AJ Segal of Appenue, a dear friend of ours, confirmed that a good CTR on emails is 3.8%-4.5% with 5% being exceptional.
Best and worst days
The single worst day is Tuesday; fewest abandonments happen on Saturday between 8:00-9:00 pm:
Best and worst sectors
Highest abandonment rates are in Travel and Financial Services, mostly due to a long and tedious process in comparison to other e-commerce experience; others attribute it to digital maturity shown by other sectors.
The fewest abandonments happen in the fashion sector, which is usually very straightforward and user friendly in comparison to the others.
Most sales are done on desktop, with 10.4% on tablets and only 6.16% on mobile:
Which means the desktop experience must be amazing, clear and without unexpected expenditures if you wish to reduce cart abandonments.
These data are extraordinary, as they shed a light on something we couldn’t explain before or at least explain in detail.
The study was conducted on 1 billion abandonments done online, so the data and conclusions are at a rock solid significance.
Hope you have enjoyed 2016’s numbers, would love to hear about 2017’s!