How to Reduce Checkout Abandonment on WooCommerce? (14 Smart Ways)

If you own a WooCommerce website, you must learn how to reduce checkout abandonment in your store. Making zero efforts to recover an abandoned cart in WooCommerce affects your business drastically.

So, it’s in your best interest to crack down on all the reasons why your customers aren’t completing their purchases. And then, you can start resolving those issues.

We’ve made that job a few steps simpler for you with this comprehensive guide on smart ways to reduce WooCommerce checkout abandonment. 

Why Should You Stop Checkout Abandonment on Your WooCommerce Shop?

We did mention that you should mitigate checkout abandonments one way or another. If you’re wondering why let us explain it in brief.

A customer abandoning their cart without completing their purchase means a decrease in conversion rate for your business. This naturally leads to a loss in your revenue. 

But that’s not all. All the effort and budget you spent on marketing goes down the drain when the conversion fails in the final step.

Even worse, you’ll have to spend more budget on retargeting ads to bring back those lost sales.

Hence, you must prevent checkout abandonment before it can impact your business drastically. It may be impossible to bring the shopping cart abandonment rate to zero. Still, you can at least try to reduce it significantly.

With that said, it’s time we discuss some ways to do that.

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How to Reduce Checkout Abandonment on WooCommerce? (14 Smart Ways)

Customers can abandon carts for a myriad of reasons. It’s crucial to find those causes and actively work on resolving them. 

All the tips we’ve listed below highlight what may be wrong with your WooCommerce store and how to prevent or fix those issues. So, without any delay, let’s jump right into it.

1. Make Checkout Easier with User Registration Plugin

A primary reason customers exit your store during checkout is because of the convoluted checkout process. 

Take the shipping and billing addresses, for example. Every time a customer makes a purchase, they’ll need to enter their shipping and billing addresses. Surely, you can understand how tedious this task is.

So, it’s not surprising for customers to just give up halfway and leave the purchase incomplete. 

But don’t worry. The User Registration plugin helps you avoid this by making checkout much easier for your customers. 

User Registration is actually a free WordPress plugin for building custom user registration forms. You can use its intuitive drag and drop builder to create any type of registration form for any kind of website, including WooCommerce websites.

The premium version of User Registration enables you to create custom WooCommerce registration forms with shipping and billing address fields. This means your customers can enter all their essential details during registration.

Thus, when a customer goes to checkout, these details are auto-filled in the checkout form. Naturally, the customers enjoy a quick and easy checkout experience thanks to that.

Hence, we recommend using the User registration plugin to reduce checkout abandonment on your WooCommerce store to make the checkout process more convenient.

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2. Keep the Checkout Form Short

Previously, we talked about making the checkout easier by auto-filling the fields in the checkout form with data provided during customer registration. 

Another way you can make checkout easier is to keep the checkout form short in the first place. There’s nothing online shoppers dread more than a 6-page checkout form while they’re trying to pay for the stuff they just purchased. 

We know it’s important to collect customer information for a deeper insight into your users and your business. But you’re better off not overdoing it. Only include the fields you think are absolutely necessary for the checkout form. 

This way, you can keep the checkout form short, retrieve vital information, and reduce checkout abandonment at the same time.

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3. Use CDN to Speed Up Your Site

You just can’t overlook website speed while analyzing the reason why customers are abandoning their cart. We’ve all fallen victims to slow loading sites at one point or another. This usually ends with us promptly exiting the site in frustration.

The same thing might be happening to your eCommerce site as well. Customers may be exiting your website before they complete the purchase because of how slow your site is. 

Even worse, the poor shopping experience could be affecting your traffic and lead generation too. So, you must improve the speed of your site with the help of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

In simple terms, a CDN is a distributed network of servers across the globe. Usually, all your website data is stored in the main server of your hosting provider. 

But, with a CDN, copies of your website data are stored in multiple servers in multiple locations. When a user tries to view your website, the content is fetched from the server nearest to the user instead of the main server. The decrease in retrieval time naturally decreases the page load time.

That’s why a website using a CDN service performs much better in terms of speed. Your global customers will enjoy a fast-performing store despite how far they are from your operating location. 

And reduced loading time means reduced checkout abandonment for your WooCommerce website.

There are plenty of CDNs available in the market to help you achieve this. Some crowd-favorites are Cloudflare, Sucuri, KeyCDN, and Imperva. You can go through this blog on the best CDN services to understand them better before deciding.

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4. Make Navigation to Cart Customer-friendly

You’re bound to see an increase in cart abandonment if your customers can’t even find their cart on your website. 

That’s why it’s wise to display the cart in your website’s menu for each page. A menu is a place that’s visible to the users no matter which page they’re on.

You can also add a ‘Go to Cart’ option whenever a user adds a product to their cart, just in case they want to check out immediately.

This way, customers can easily find and navigate to their cart whenever they’re ready for checkout.

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5. Give Shipping Discounts

Who doesn’t love discounts, especially when it’s on shipping fees? 

You’ll see people complaining more about shipping costs than the product price itself. No wonder that online shoppers leave your store before checkout as soon as they see the costly shipping fees.

A generous discount on shipping is a great positive incentive for customers who’d rather not pay a large sum for shipping their products. You can even make shipping entirely free for cart totals that cross a certain amount.

Customers are much more likely to complete their purchase once they see the shipping discount your store is offering.

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6. Offer Discounts and Coupons

Nothing is as tempting as discounts and coupons on your favorite products. So, you can display discounts and coupons on the checkout page as an encouragement for customers to complete the purchase.

For example, you can use Black Friday Offers, Christmas Sale, and Seasonal Winter Discounts as an incentive for customers to complete the checkout.

As we’ve mentioned before, offering discounts based on cart totals is another option as well.

Similarly, coupons entice customers with the promise of discounts to buy products on your site. Only after they apply the coupon code during checkout, they’ll be able to receive said discount.

So, it’s a pretty convenient way to reduce checkout abandonment in your store if you ask us.

It’s made even easier by plugins like Discount Rules for WooCommerce and Smart Coupons for WooCommerce. You can create advanced discount rules, generate coupons, and so much more.

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7. Provide Multiple Payment Gateways

Anyone who’s shopped online before knows the dilemma of getting only one or two payment options. Obviously, no one’s going to create a new account with a different gateway just to shop on your site. They’d rather look for a store that supports the payment gateway they use. 

Moreover, it’s quite possible for credit cards to be denied during checkout. Having multiple payment options means customers can opt for another payment method during a failed transaction.

So, it’s a good idea to offer multiple payment gateways to avoid losing customers during checkout. 

WooCommerce supports integration with many payment gateways, so you don’t have to worry about them being incompatible with your site. You can easily choose from options like PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Square, and many more.

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8. Enable Guest Checkout

Not every customer has the patience to register an account for buying products on an online shopping portal. Some just want a quick checkout without the wall of registration between the shop and their cart.

In such cases, enabling guest checkout might be the perfect solution. This means users will browse your store, add products to their cart, and then checkout as guests. 

Take Best Buy for example. It does ask users to register if they’re returning customers. However, people who just want to complete a quick purchase are allowed to continue as guests as well.

Luckily, WooCommerce lets you quickly enable guest checkout from its Settings. Just open the Accounts & Privacy settings tab and tick the checkbox for Allow customers to place orders without an account in Guest Checkout. This allows customers to place orders and checkout without an account.

With the need for registration eliminated, your store is bound to see a decrease in the number of checkout abandonments.

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9. Create a Sense of Urgency

Any product on sale for a limited amount of time immediately catches our eyes. Most of us would probably rush to get our hands on the product before the sale ends. And sometimes, we end up buying things we don’t even need.

You can create this same sense of urgency for your customers by offering special discounts for a limited time. This, in turn, drives more customers to complete their purchase, which they might have abandoned if not for the urgency of the sale offer.

So, try this tip out on your WooCommerce store and see how it works for you!

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10. Add a Security Badge on the Checkout Page

We all know the anxiety of entering our credit card information while shopping online. We all need assurance that we’re providing our sensitive information to a trusted company.

Your customers are probably experiencing the same thing. So, you need to add a security badge on the checkout page of your WooCommerce store. 

They’re a straightforward way of telling your customers that your site is secure. Indeed, this small step will increase the confidence in your customers to complete their purchase on your WooCommerce store.

Now, there are different types of security or trust badges you can display. Some of them are money-back guarantee seals, secure card payment icons, and security badges from Norton.

You can simply implement them on your site based on where and what kind of security badge you need.

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11. Use Social Proof

When we’re in some kind of dilemma, we tend to look at what other people are doing. This social confirmation makes us more confident in our own decisions somehow. 

The same tactic can be applied to your store as well. All you have to do is show social proof that other customers are buying and liking your products. So, your product or service becomes something they definitely don’t want to miss out on.

It’s as simple as displaying social proof notifications. These notifications show a message whenever a customer engages with your store positively. It can be buying a product, downloading an eBook, or signing up for a newsletter. 

Tools like TrustPulse and NotificationX are the perfect tools to help you build credibility for your brand instantly with social proof. This, in turn, reduces doubtful customers abandoning their carts during checkout.

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12. Place Exit Intent Popups on Your Site

An Exit Intent pop-up appears on your customer’s screen whenever they’re about to exit the page. These pop-ups contain product deals or offers to intrigue customers and keep them from leaving your site.

So, these pop-ups are best placed on product and checkout pages. With the help of exit intent pop-ups, your customers are less likely to abandon their carts.

Don’t know how to add exit-intent pop-ups to your site? Well, OptinMonster will help you in that regard with their Exit Intent Technology. With this tool, you can easily display customized pop-ups on your checkout page and reduce WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment.

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13. Send Email Reminders

The internet is full of distractions. So, it’s very much possible that your customers left their cart to attend to some other tasks. In such cases, they might forget that they left without making any purchase. 

Now, it’s your job to remind these customers to get back to their abandoned WooCommerce carts and buy the products they’d been meaning to. 

You can do so by sending reminders to their email addresses after a certain number of days. It’s better to include the details of the products added in their cart and the checkout page link in the email template. You can also provide customers with options to save the cart for later or empty the cart altogether.

With that, you’ll be able to recover the abandoned cart on your WooCommerce store in no time.

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14. Use WordPress Plugins to Recover Abandoned Cart

If you’re familiar with WordPress, then you must also know that there’s a plugin for everything. Yes, even to recover an abandoned cart on your WooCommerce site. 

These cart recovery plugins automate the process of coupon creation, capturing emails, saving carts, sending email reminders, etc., to help you capture lost sales.

A few reliable options are Retainful, WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery, and WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart. You can get started with any plugin of your choice and reduce checkout abandonment without any hassle.

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Wrapping Up

There’s no way to completely stop checkout abandonment on any WooCommerce store. But it’s possible to reduce it and prevent severe damage to your revenue.

You can start with keeping the checkout process quick and short while providing secure payment methods. You can then offer discounts, send email reminders, use Exit Intent popups, and enable guest checkout.

Besides that, you can use WordPress plugins like WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart to get a headstart in reducing checkout abandonment.

And with that said, it’s time to wrap up this article on how to reduce checkout abandonment. But don’t stop here! There are plenty of other WordPress-related articles to read on our blog.

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