Abandoned cart: how to recover lost sales

On almost every eCommerce store, most carts never reach checkout: the customer adds the products, starts buying and at some point leaves. An abandoned cart is a sale you already had halfway home, and recovering even part of them is worth more than bringing in new traffic, because those people wanted the product. The good news is that the reasons they leave are almost always the same, and you can act on all of them.

Why customers abandon their cart

Before chasing lost sales it's worth understanding where you lose them. The recurring causes we see in the stores we look after are few and concrete:

• Shipping costs that only appear at the end: the customer has a price in mind, at the last step they see a higher one and close the tab. It's by far the most frequent cause.
• A checkout that's too long or requires registration: too many fields, too many steps, being forced to create an account before you can pay.
• Too few payment methods: if the one the customer usually uses is missing, the purchase stops there.
• Unanswered doubts: unclear delivery times, a hidden returns policy, no reassurance about payment security.
• Simply putting it off: sometimes the customer just wanted to think about it. This is the case a recovery email solves best.

Recovery emails: timing and content

The abandoned-cart email is the most effective tool for bringing back people who were only putting it off, but it needs one technical requirement: capturing the email address early in the checkout, otherwise you have no one to write to. From there a short sequence works, not a single message: a first reminder a few hours later, while the intent is still fresh, showing the products left in the cart and a button to pick up the purchase where it stopped; a second message the next day, addressing the typical doubts (shipping, returns, availability); and possibly a third with a small incentive, to be used sparingly so you don't train customers to wait for a discount. The tone should be one of service: you're helping to complete something the person had started, not chasing them.

A simpler checkout converts more

Every extra step and every extra field is a chance to abandon. On the checkout, the changes that pay off most are clear: allow guest checkout, without forcing people to register before paying; ask only for the data you need to ship and invoice; show from the start how far along the process is; and make it comfortable on a phone, because that's where abandonment is always higher. In the eCommerce projects we look after, streamlining the checkout is almost always the first thing we do, because it affects all customers and not only those who receive an email.

This work changes depending on the type of store. In Propell Shop, the B2B wholesale leather-goods eCommerce we built on PrestaShop, the purchase flow is tuned to professional customers who order in volume, with needs different from a retail store: the cart and checkout have to be designed for how people who do this for a living buy.

Transparent shipping costs from the start

Since the surprise over shipping costs is the number-one cause of abandonment, the countermeasure is to show them as early as possible. Make the terms clear right on the product page and in the cart, not at checkout. If you have a free-shipping threshold, state it and show how much is left to reach it, because that often pushes the customer to add a product instead of leaving. And if you sell abroad too, make times and costs clear for each destination up front. In Il Sole del Sud, the artisanal Sicilian preserves eCommerce we built, shipping is handled by SDA and Crono in Italy and Europe: making the terms clear for each destination right from the cart keeps the customer from stalling at the last step.

Want to recover the carts you're losing?

Abandoned sales aren't lost forever: a simpler checkout, transparent shipping costs and a good recovery-email sequence bring back a real share of them. We develop websites and eCommerce with a focus on exactly the points where customers stall. Book a free call: we'll analyze your purchase funnel and tell you where you're losing sales and how to recover them.