Shopify Checkout Hacks: Grow Conversions & Reduce Abandoned Carts

As a Shopify storefront, your goal is always to convert visitors into customers. One of the greatest challenges to any business owner is abandoned carts. Did you know: according to Baymard Institute, most online shopping carts are abandoned?

On Shopify, every abandoned cart is a lost customer. Your Shopify checkout helps you accept orders and payments wherever you sell online. It is hard to tell whether you lost the customer due to competitors, or if they left due to poor customer satisfaction with your shopping process.

If you struggle with lost conversions and abandoned carts, there are numerous ways that you can improve your buying experience to avoid this. Most of these tips are useful and simple to implement. As an eCommerce expert, our experts at UserLoop provides actionable steps to ensure that you create more conversions for your storefront.

What is An Abandoned Cart?

Abandoned carts are every eCommerce business owner’s worst nightmare. Imagine a customer getting all the way to the last stages of purchasing your product, and then they leave the item in the cart. Abandoned carts are products left behind, forgotten, and not returned to. Customers are guilty of leaving items behind for numerous reasons.  

Why Do Customers Abandon Carts and Why Is It Important?

Cart abandonment—if numerous—can become a serious issue for your business. No one wants to see metrics that indicate challenges with earning customers! There are many reasons why this happens. Every customer has their own reason, but here are the most popular:

• Hidden prices
  
• Too complex of a buying process
  
• Few payment options
  
• No Shopify guest checkout
  
• Long shipping estimation
  
• Security or privacy concerns
  

Once you see why customers abandon their carts, you can work to satisfy them and eliminate these situations. You can look at Shopify checkout examples and go to edit Shopify checkout page for your store after finding the source of your customer complaints. 

How to Reduce Abandoned Carts

1. Using Abandoned Cart Surveys to get Insights on Why Customers Churn

Sending abandoned cart survey emails help you to engage your customer and perhaps earn a sale if you happen to convince them to purchase. At the very least, this tool will tell you why they chose not to buy. 


One way to understand why customers are not converting into loyal fans of your brand is by attaching an abandoned cart survey. With a Shopify app like UserLoop, this can be automatically installed right on your Shopify order confirmation page.  

You can customize your survey, make it fun, and ensure that your customers give the feedback you need to improve your checkout process. 

2. Send Out Abandoned Cart Emails & Other Notifications

More so than using a survey, sending an abandoned cart email, text messages or push notifications can be a way to remind the customer that they have not purchased their items. It can either engage them or, better yet, incite encourage them into purchasing the items in the cart! 

With the help of a Shopify application like Rivo Abandoned Cart Recovery, you can get closer to understanding gaps in your checkout process. 

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3. Analyze Your Abandoned Cart Analytics 

It’s important to gather your survey responses, but you also need to ensure that you can capture the analytics behind it. If you’re looking to really improve your checkout experience and eliminate abandoned carts, response analytics can be the key to refining the customer experience.

Shopify provides analytics on your online store’s conversion rate, where you can draw your abandoned cart rate:

Abandoned cart rate = [(added to cart sessions - # of sales) / added to cart sessions] * 100

So here: 

[(61 - 35) / 61] * 100 = 42.6% (1 decimal point)


With these analytics, you can triangulate your findings with other insights drawn from the surveys and abandoned cart notifications to decrease your abandoned cart rate.  

4. Allow for People to Cancel the Order and Request a Reason

Some customers will make mistakes on their order, need to change their information or cancel entirely. Order cancellations can be confusing and hard to understand. By implementing a cancel order option at checkout or on their profile with an app like Orderify, you can allow the customer to cancel and find out why they did so.

By finding out why the order was cancelled, you’re likely to find correlations to your abandoned carts, too. It only takes a simple one question response and you’ll at least have more insight into why they left their items behind. 

5. Be Transparent About Your Policies and Your Pricing

Customers will often abandon their carts if they feel that they cannot trust you as a storefront. This is why it is absolutely crucial to be transparent about your policies. Add in a terms and conditions checkbox with RoarTheme, or even be upfront about your refund policy on the checkout page.

If your customer doesn’t know the policy, they can be upset, request a refund, and cause an issue that could be avoided with more transparency. Add in a terms and conditions checkbox for them to recognize the policy. You can also do this with the refund policy on the checkout page, too!

6. Add Additional Payment Options for Your Customers

If customers are finding that they can’t pay for their items, they are more likely to leave the cart abandoned and click out of the Shopify checkout screen. The easiest way to fix this would be to open more payment options on Shopify. This can be easily done with Shopify Payments through your account.

You can offer PayPal, Visa, and several others. If your customer wants to pay with PayPal, be sure to offer that! The most important thing is to listen to your customers, hear what they need, and find a way to provide it. 

7. Create a Seamless Experience with One Checkout Page

If you are operating with multiple pages or multiple Shopify checkout steps for your checkout, that might be why individuals leave the carts abandoned. If your process is too complex, people are not going to want to continue forward. There are only so many pages you can include before your customer starts to feel like they are reading a novel! 

With the one-page checkout Shopify form, you can ensure that your customer doesn’t get lost, bored, or tired of waiting for the next page to be completed. An application like TeleCheckout can easily help you condense your checkout procedure. 

With that information, you can have a Shopify one-click checkout page design and ensure you get a maximum number of responses. Your customer wants a fast checkout; Shopify offers you plenty of ways to improve upon this!

Step Up Your Checkout Game on Shopify

Abandoned carts are no fun. As a Shopify store, your goal is to stop this from happening as much as possible. With the steps mentioned above, you can avoid any challenges in the future, focus on improving the customer experience, and see great success as a result. 

Not only will your business improve and benefit, but your customers will notice your attention to detail and likely be more loyal to your brand! It’s a win-win for both you and the customer, so there’s no reason not to improve your checkout process.