Often customers adds items into their shopping cart, and then just abandon the cart and leave the site without making the purchase. According to a study conducted by marketingsherpa in 2006 across 1,100 ecommerce businesses, the average shopping cart abandonment rate was 60%.
Do you know what your shopping cart abandonment rate is?
The “shopping cart abandonment rate” is an important metric that every small business online retailer should measure. And the good news is that this metric can be easily measured using Google Analytics, a free service.
Google Analytics does require moderate technical skills to get set up (you need to place a line of Google code on your pages). But once set up, it provides an easy tool to accurately measure the customer drop off points from your website. You can observe the funnel starting from the main page of your website where the customer begins the shopping process, to individual product pages, to the checkout process, to payment information, and track the customer drop off rate precisely at every stage of the funnel. This will in turn help you identify improvement opportunities to the shopping process.
Given that Google Analytics is a free service, and can be set up with minimal help from a technical expert, there is no reason to not measure your shopping cart abandonment rate.