Combating Cart Abandonment During Black Friday: Proven Strategies to Recover Lost Sales
As Black Friday rapidly approaches, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Shoppers are flocking online, looking for the best deals. In the flurry of this search they may add items to their cart, only to leave them behind. With billions in potential revenue on the table, it is essential that all cart abandonment automations are in place so that you can capture the most sales during this peak shopping period.
In Australia alone, Black Friday 2024 sales hit a record $36 million, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Yet, even with this increase in spending up to 70% of shopping carts are abandoned – a significant opportunity, especially during the peak shopping periods.
Black Friday sales continue to spike every year across all states by 1%. This trend also shows a drop in sales in October with people holding off purchases until Black Friday deals arise. This makes it critical to ensure that all potential sales are captured and converted during the Black Friday- Cyber Monday weekend.
The good news? With proven strategies you can recover these lost sales and turn abandoned carts into conversions. In this guide, we will run through tactics you can use this Black Friday to reduce cart abandonment, leverage automation, and capture every possible sale.
How to Prepare for Black friday Ecommerce
In order to capitalise on the surge in consumers looking for deals for your ecommerce site you will need to examine your current abandoned cart automations. If you don’t have any in place, now is the time to begin!
All major ecommerce stores will have an “abandoned cart email” that can be switched on and also personalised for their shoppers. If you need help finding these you can refer to Shopify’s help centre about setting up abandoned cart emails for example.'
What to sell on Black Friday
Selecting a compelling deal for Black Friday based on your stock availability and also customer demand can be challenging, but it can also be an opportunity to rather than discount, upsell and offer better value. Consumers will be keenly examining the best deals and it doesn’t need to just be a flat % off storewide sale.
Sometimes a simple upsell or bundled item or free shipping over a minimum order amount is enough to drive strong sales.
This is a strategy in itself and requires looking at past successes and also promotions that have had a strong response as well as identifying your hero SKUS that have a profitable margin to discount.
Either way if you have a strong idea of what is trending in store and selling well this is always a great place to start.
Why do customers abandon carts?
Cart abandonment is one of the major pain points for ecommerce stores, especially during peak sale events like Black Friday. Understanding why customers abandon their carts is the first step in building a strategy to increase your sales and conversions.
Customers frequently abandon carts when shopping for multiple reasons:
They can’t make up their mind
They are not ready to purchase
They may not have seen an offer or understood the discount or timeframe
They may not clearly know your brand and unique USP’s
A recent 2024 study by the Baymard Institute revealed that 70.9% of online shopping carts are abandoned.
The reason that they found can be at almost every touch point in the purchase process including:
Page load speed being too slow
Website not optimised for Mobile Phones
Shipping rates too high
Shipping Speed too slow
Checkouts are too long
Inability to checkout as a guest
Confusing pricing or offers
Lack of trust or social proof
Not offering good payment options
The bottom line is that taking into account all the above factors presents an opportunity to convert more sales if you are strategic at identifying the conversion pathways and where shoppers are dropping off.
Luckily Google Analytics 4 and other tools like Search Console can give you a very clear insight of where the majority of your traffic is coming from and how many times it takes for a consumer to view a website before actually converting. In fact many customers will often do a digital stalk across networks from socials to paid adverts to the website, going over many touch points before they become a customer. These touchpoints can be analysed and tweaked.
As you can see from this table from Google Analytics it clearly shows how many people convert from first visit to purchase by device and how many are lost in the process.
Who picks up abandoned shopping carts?
As an ecommerce business this is your responsibility to look at ways to improve cart abandonment rates. You have the opportunity to take this issue on board and develop automations and processes to directly increase your store revenue throughout the year and especially for Black Friday deals.
The majority of ecommerce platforms have an abandoned cart email you can switch on at the very minimum. If you use your store data as well as GA4 and Google Search Console you can view reports as you can see below which show you how many people are dropping off the website without purchasing.
How to find cart abandonment in Google Analytics
There are many useful tools in GA4, including reports where you can find the abandonment rate. As you can see below, 97.6% of all users that do not check out and 2.4% that successfully purchase.
You can also use reports to reverse engineer the people the steps made for the people that did purchase.
This can be a very interesting and eye-opening exercise that will give insights about the pages and products that convert the best.
You can also install apps like Hotjar where you can observe how people behave on your site. This is useful to see the pages and areas that are most clicked on so that you can work on these to increase engagement and conversions. Remember the longer a potential customer stays on your site the more likely they are likely to purchase. Improving content is a major piece that should not be ignored in cart abandonment. Most people unconsciously decide if they are going to buy within a few seconds.
Google conducted research in 2011 that showed that 70% of potential buyers make a decision online before contacting the business for the first time. This has not changed even today and is highly relevant.
You can create reports very easily in Google Analytics to find where people are leaving your website without purchasing.
How to calculate cart abandonment rate?
Calculating cart abandonment rate is quite easy. You simply divide the number of complete purchases by the number of add to baskets.
So, if you had 40 purchases and 91 add to baskets it would be 40 divided by 91 and then x 100 = 43.9% in the case of the Shopify store.
How to see abandoned checkouts in Shopify
If you have a Shopify store you navigate to - Admin- Orders- Abandoned Checkouts. Below you can see the carts that were abandoned very easily.
How long to wait to send abandoned cart email
Luckily, most platforms automate the process for you so it is as simple as switching on the automation. In shopify go to - marketing- automations and you will see two automations that you can preview that cover abandoned carts and also view abandonment.
By clicking on the preview you can see that it is very easy to turn on for both browse abandonment and cart abandonment.
Please note: you will need to use Shopify emails to use this native store feature. It will automatically send to all customers that left items in the cart and excludes people that have already received one in the last 14 days.
Alternative Cart Abandonment Automations for your ecommerce store
You can use alternative apps that integrate and work with your ecommerce store like Klaviyo. There are pre built flows that you can simply modify to your branding and brand tone and add great offers and CTA’s to coerce a potential customer back to their cart to complete the purchase.
These flows are very powerful and sent often within 4 hrs of the cart being left however you can modify the time to your needs to be sent out.
The advantage of using an alternative to native apps is that they are often more sophisticated and use predictive AI to determine many factors related to predictive spending etc. They also use dynamic images so that it is personalised for the customer. This means that they will see the exact product in the email that is in their cart. It sounds obvious but this was not available previously. Personalisation is the key to converting a browser into a paying customer.
If you look at the above example of automated flows that have been set up in this Klaviyo account since January 2024 to September 2024 this store received $29,996.32 in revenue from these emails.
Keep in mind these are all automated flows therefore automated income.
Not only is this store utilising Klaviyo for browse abandonment and abandoned carts, it is also targeting high value abandoned carts with a different email/offer to low value carts. Klaviyo is a wonderful tool to send newsletters, set up flows and automations and grow followers and revenue for your ecommerce platform.
The bottom line is that if you are not actively using your native ecommerce platform or a different app to automate abandonment - either browse or carts, you are leaving money on the table.
Make this a priority during the 2024 Black Friday Sales and going forward into the new year!
If you would like some more help with fine tuning your ecommerce store get in contact with Agora today!
