It’s really frustrating, you did all the hard work by building a great ecommerce website, as a result people should instantly buy from you, right?

You have looked at all the ways to improve your SEO. Your marketing and social media is awesome and people are coming to your website, so you have everything up and running as it should be.

The problem is, customers added products to their basket, however, ‘poof’ they disappear, resulting in a lost potential sale, therefore you’re left scratching your head, asking yourself

“What did I do wrong?”

Every website large or small has this problem, so you’re not alone!

First of all you should do is to try and understand how many people abandon your online store when they have products in their basket. It’s also known as your abandonment rate.

How to calculate your abandonment rate on your ecommerce store

It’s an easy thing to do.

You need to divide the total number of completed transactions by the total number of shopping carts with at least one item in their basket that never completed. Then you multiply this figure by 100 to get the percentage.

Let’s use an example.

Say this month 200 accounts successfully completed a purchase on your store. Also you know that you had a total number of 300 accounts with at least 1 item in their baskets.

The calculation would be as follows

200 divided by 300 x 100 = 66.66%

So you know that this month 66.66% abandon your online store without completing a purchase or in other words your abandonment rate is 66.66%.

What is an average abandonment rate on online stores?

The figures vary from which source did the research, by country and when the research was conducted, however if you take a broad view on it, a rate of 65-75% is around the average.

Based on one study they found that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 78.65%

Another cited that in 2017 cart abandonment rate was just under 70%

You can learn a lot from this and breathe a sigh of relief because most stores have issues.

If you have a high percentage of people that abandon your online store before buying anything with things in their baskets, then it’s kind of the norm.

That being said,  there are ways in which to increase the conversion rate and reduce cart abandonment, above all it’s something all ecommerce store owners should try and do.

Prima Software have put together a useful infographic. It illustrates how much cart abandonment could be costing you in lost sales.