A lot of people seem surprised when they get dozens of adds to cart and only a few purchases. However, rest assured that it’s totally normal and common that most people abandon the cart.
The industry average abandoned cart rate is about 80-90%.
It can vary on your niche, the country you’re targeting and many other factors, but the great majority of people will abandon the cart.
So why is that?
Well, first of all it means people have a buying intent.
However, buying intent and making a purchase are two completely different things. People are lazy, the have all sorts of objections, they experience internal resistance and they might have trust issues.
When people buy from your e-commerce store, they need to overcome a series of obstacles. First they need to add the item to the cart, then they need to click on “Checkout”. After that they need to fill out a ton of fields and forms with their shipping address. They need to select a payment option which might cause second thoughts.
People drop off on all steps of the checkout process and that’s totally normal. Unexpected costs, shipping fees, obstacles, trust issues and not having the desired payment option are common reasons for it.
You as an e-commerce store owner need to understand that all of this is a numbers game. Don’t get fed up or worked up if people abandon the cart. Start with a reality check and setting realistic expectations.
If you expect everyone who adds the item to the cart to finish the checkout, you are delusional and don’t understand marketing.
As I said, online marketing is a pure numbers game.
On each step of the process people will drop off. From 4,000 people that see your ad, maybe 1,000 will click. And from those people, maybe 100 will add the item to the cart. And then from those 100 people maybe 20 of them will complete the checkout process.
As you can see you’ve lost people on each step and that’s normal. You aren’t “god” and have less control over people than you think.
Now your goal is obviously to optimize each step of the funnel.
If you can get more people to click on your ad, more people to add the item to the cart and more people to recover the abandoned cart, your advertising becomes more profitable and you make more sales.
Just keep testing and improving your advertising “game”.
The more experienced you get, the more you can manipulate this numbers game in your favor and squeeze out more profit.
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