Transform your Shopify abandoned carts into sales with these conversion-boosting surveys

Have you ever visited a store, found a product you’re interested in, added it to your cart, then left without proceeding to checkout?

So many people do this. And there are a plethora of reasons that shoppers abandon during the checkout process. 

According to data from the Baymard Institute, the average car abandonment rate is 69.57%.

So that's every 7 out of 10 of your shoppers that don’t complete their purchase.

In other words… 7 lost opportunities to sell for every 10 customers in your store!

And what’s even more frightening is that the rate is even higher for mobile users - around 85%! Only 15% of your users on mobile, actually proceed with their purchase. The rest are lost to your competitors.

Now that I’ve painted the picture of how much money you could be leaving on the table. Let’s see what you can do about it.

If you hadn’t already guessed from the title of this blog post, today we’ll be looking at how you can use effective abandon cart surveys to transform your exiters into paying customers that boost your revenue.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article: 

• What is cart abandonment and why surveys are important

• The top 5 main reasons people abandon carts

• Questions you should be asking on your abandoned cart surveys

• How to set up your abandoned cart survey

What is cart abandonment?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of why people abandon shopping carts, it’s important you understand exactly what cart abandonment is.

Cart abandonment is when a shopper that could be a new or existing customer adds one or more products to their cart but leaves your store without checking out.

What is an abandoned cart survey?

You probably already worked this one out, but an abandoned cart survey is a survey that pops up either during or after cart abandonment.

There are 2 ways you can initiate an abandoned cart survey:

1) Exit-intent popup surveys

You can trigger an exit-intent popup on your Shopify Store to appear to customers that are in their cart and move their cursor towards the tab bars to leave your site. 

The popup will prompt them to let you know why they’re leaving without completing their purchase (more on how to do this later).

✅ Pros of exit-intent popup surveys

• Get data faster

• The reason for abandoning is fresh in your customer's mind

• Higher chance of the survey being completed

❌ Cons of exit-intent popup survey

• They don’t work on mobile devices (and we already know this is where most of your customers are)

• More difficult to persuade your customers to come back with this method

So if popups to try and prevent your customers from leaving are not that effective, what else can you do? Try this…

2) Abandoned cart email surveys

An abandoned cart email survey is a great tool you can use to help you bring your customers back into your store, whip out their wallets and give you their money.

Here’s how it works:

After they abandon your store without checking out you send a simple email asking why they left without purchasing. 

This sort of outreach shows your customers you care about them and want to help.

It also provides an opportunity to get your customers back onto your store to complete their purchases. You do this with a complete sequence of emails offering incentives for them to come back to you, but more on that another time.

✅ Pro’s abandoned cart email surveys

• Stay front of mind when the customer may be considering your competitors

• Ask more questions

• Bring your customers back to your store with the click of a button in the email

• You can extend the sequence to include incentives to bring the customer back to you

❌ Cons of abandoned cart email surveys

• Can be tricky for new customers - if you never asked for their email address before they placed the item in the basket, you have no email address to send the survey to

Now you know what to do to help you boost your conversions and reduce abandoned carts. Let's take a look at the top reasons people leave their carts without completing the checkout…

The top 5 main reasons people abandon carts

There are so many reasons Shopify customers abandon their carts. But today we have time for just the top 5 based on different eCommerce studies.

These are the ones that will have the greatest positive impact on your revenues if addressed. So let’s dive in…

1) Extra costs (55% Baymard Institute)

Say you’re a customer looking for a cool case for your phone. 

You land on fonecases4you and find the perfect case. You love the design and the price is reasonable.

You click ‘buy now’, happy and excited about your new case that will arrive soon, but what’s this?

A $10 shipping fee?!

Now that case is overpriced and your initial emotion is dulled. Time to start shopping around…

2) An account is required (34% Baymard Institute)

Some people just don’t want to go through the whole process of setting up an account to purchase from you.

They want the option to checkout as a guest, especially if they only intend to make this one-time purchase.

Making the checkout process as smooth and simple as possible will improve your conversion rates.

3) Unclear pricing/discount doesn’t work (46% Statistica)

Nothing is more frustrating than thinking you’re going to get 20% off, only to find the code doesn’t work. 

You jump onto google and search “[store name] discount codes”.

Jumping from result to result just to find more codes that don’t work. 

You’re annoyed and unlikely to continue with your purchase, right? 

This is how your customers feel when your pricing either isn’t clear or discount codes don’t work. 

But the even scarier statistic is that over 80% of these customers will NEVER return to your store after this experience.

4) Shipping takes too long (36% Statistica)

Amazon Prime delivery has changed the face of shipping.

It’s free for members and takes less than 24 hours to arrive in your hands.

It’s the ultimate convenience. But this means that shipping that takes too long is a big no-no for many customers.

1 in 3 of your customers will abandon your cart if the shipping time is too long for them. Research what shipping options your competitors are offering and either match or better it.

5) Checkout is too long (26% Baymard Institute)

Online shoppers are impatient.

They expect to wait 5-10mins in a queue with in-store retail. But when they’re shopping online it needs to be almost instantaneous.

I’m not even kidding here. Studies have shown that online shoppers will leave the checkout process if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load!

Quite the contrast of wait times, huh? But knowing that over half of your online shoppers won’t continue if page load times are too high is actionable. Increase your speeds if this is the issue.

There are probably things you can start working on now to help fix cart abandonment on your Shopify store. 

But if you want to prioritize the tasks and know what's affecting your specific customer's behavior, you need to ask them.

That’s where the abandoned cart surveys come in. So let’s take a look at the sorts of questions you should be asking on your exit-intent or emails surveys…

Questions you should be asking on your abandoned cart surveys

You’ll want to ask questions that prompt your customer to tell you the main reason they didn’t complete their purchase. 

Asking questions that are too general, will affect the response rate unless you have super clear answer options.

So to avoid limited actionable data, you want to optimize your survey questions for the highest possible completion. For that, I’ve put together some example questions you can swipe and use instantly…

• What prevented you from completing your purchase today?

  • Shipping or other additional costs

  • Slow checkout process

  • The discount code didn’t work

  • I don’t want to create an account

  • I didn’t feel safe checking out

• What could we do to make your purchasing process easier?

• Do you have any concerns about checking out today?

  • Yes - please specify

  • No - what prevented you from completing your purchase

These 3 questions are a great place to start. You can customize your survey questions to focus on the top 5 reasons people leave if you want more specific data.

What’s most important is that you start to understand why YOUR CUSTOMERS are leaving without completing purchases. This is the first step to making more sales and boosting your bank balance.

How to set up your abandoned cart survey

The easiest and more secure way of setting up your abandoned cart survey for your Shopify store is with UserLoop. 

Set up the survey in the app and then leave it to do its thing. 

All you need to do is check the results in the analytics tab and make fixes according to the data you receive.

You can get started with a free UserLoop account today and create your first survey in less than 5 minutes.

Click here to create your Shopify abandoned cart survey and start boosting your revenues