How can OpenCart website owners recover the sales lost due to shopping cart abandonment? | Knowband

How can OpenCart website owners recover the sales lost due to Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Online Sellers are losing money every day. I can say this very confidently because a survey laid by Baymard Institute says that in the UK, 76.45% of the total online sales are lost because of the shopping cart abandonment. Truth to be told, for every 100 potential customers, 67 of them just leave the site without completing the checkout. This scenario is not true just for the UK but every corner of the world. I wonder, how much would be the conversion rates if anyone could save those customers from abandoning your online shopping cart.

A research by Statistia suggests 14 main reasons for why shopping cart abandonments occur on an eCommerce site.

Why do online shoppers leave without paying? | Knowband

The reasons for shopping cart abandonment on an eCommerce site are even more than that. We can fight with them, but truth to be told, we cannot just eradicate them all even through the most advanced conversion optimization tools. There are some scenarios that can be minimized to show the least effect on the sales but we cannot avoid them at once. The reasons for shopping cart abandonment are numerous and they require some vigorous efforts and a considerable amount of time to be minimized. My concern here is not to go for the ways to avoid or eradicate the shopping cart abandonment, but to find a way to face and deal with them.

There are two ways to deal with the shopping cart abandonment on your site. 

1. Ways to prevent- before cart abandonment.

2. Ways to recover- After cart abandonment.

There are numerous article and research reports on the web stating the ways to prevent shopping cart abandonments, and these articles are effective too. But, going with my concern here, I would like put some points that can be utilized to face the worst case scenario of shopping cart abandonments on an OpenCart site. OpenCart is an open-source eCommerce website solution that represents a quiet competitive control panel and a flexibility to manage some light weight eCommerce sites. Being a light weight and an open source solution, OpenCart lags in some areas when it actually resembles to prevent shopping cart abandonments. Well, it’s not a problem in only OpenCart sites, but many of the major open source and even some premium solutions cannot prevent the causes of shopping cart abandonment.

So, let’s get to the point where we would try to know some ways to deal with the inevitable. Shopping cart abandonments occur for multiple reasons and we cannot eradicate all of them at once. But, instead, we can be ready to face the OpenCart abandoned carts on the site. We can plan a strategy to deal with them instead of avoiding or ignoring them. If avoiding or preventing a shopping cart abandonment is not completely in our hands, then we can go for the recovery options to minimize the losses.

One of the best recovery options in this case is an OpenCart abandoned cart module or extension. We have to prepare our site to deal with the already occurred OpenCart abandoned cart instances, and for this to happen, the site must be ready to manage them in such a way that they generate the possibility to lure the customers back to the site. An OpenCart abandoned cart extension works smartly b sending messages and notifications to the customers reminding them about the abandoned cart they have left on your site. Well, the reminders are not at all enough to lure them back. So these extensions also possess the features to send some encouragements with the notifications.

OpenCart abandoned cart extensions

How an OpenCart abandoned cart extension would help you recover your lost sales?

1. An OpenCart abandon cart extension works as a cron level real time system

An OpenCart abandoned cart extension works as a real-time system that operates according to the cron level settings. The cron level setting is required to setup the serial reminders with different email templates that are set to send different messages at different interval of time.

2. Can be set to discover the new abandoned carts

The extensions automatically add the orphan carts in the abandoned cart list and notify to the admin as soon as a cart crosses the time limit set to decide if a cart would be considered as abandoned or not. So, whenever the cron finds a new orphan cart, it updates them in the list.

3. It becomes very easy to send automatic emails

Through an abandoned cart extension, it becomes very easy to send serial reminders automatically without any manual intervention. The cron can be set to decide which email template would be sent to the customers at what time. So, the admin can set different email templates to be sent at different time slots. Say, the first email would be sent after 7 hours and without any offer, and the second email will be sent after 24 hours and with an offer. You can look at this example for a similar scenario:

The emails would include:

Pictures of the products they left in the cart

Reviews or ratings from other customers

Guarantee and easy refund policy information

A strong call to action to get them back again

Timing the emails:

1st email – should go out within 24 hrs

2nd email – send within 2 days

3rd email – send within 1 week

How can OpenCart website owners recover the sales lost due to shopping cart abandonment?- Example of an abandoned cart email | knowband
Example of an abandoned cart email from a site to one of its customers.

4. Know your abandoned customers

How can OpenCart website owners recover the sales lost due to shopping cart abandonment?- Know your abandoned customers | Knowband
A central control panel to browse and manage the abandoned carts

The reporting system of an OpenCart abandoned cart extension provides the information about the customers who have abandoned your shopping cart. These information contain the details like name of the customer, email Id, Products in the cart. With these information you can also analyse why the particular customers would have left the cart and exit your site.

5. Know your site’s cart statistics

An OpenCart abandoned cart extension not only provide the interface to manage the emails to be sent but also it can be used as a research tool to find out how many carts are being abandoned at the moment and you can also compare your current cart performance with the earlier ones. With these information, you can plan your conversion optimization strategy based on the analytic.

Ad Re-targeting

How can OpenCart website owners recover the sales lost due to shopping cart abandonment?- Ad Re-targeting | Knowband
Ad re-targeting in association with an effective OpenCart extension can recover the other 98 % sales.

The another after cart abandonment method is by conducting an Ad Re-targeting campaign. A research by AdRoll, says that “2%” of buyers convert on the first visit itself. But your re-targeting strategy can bring the other 98% buyers back to the site. The ad re-targeting works by fetching the cookies from your site and utilizing them to advertise your site on the other site where the customer visits after abandoning your site. The condition for ad re-targeting is that your site needs to have an ad re-targeting partnership with the other site. For this, you can select any Ad re-targeting partner.

Solution by Knowband

The OpenCart abandon cart extension can be used by the website owners to get strengthen their after cart abandonment strategy. It’s a heavy duty OpenCart extension that gets installed like any other OpenCart extension and performs all the task needed to be performed by a competitive OpenCart abandoned cart extension . So, now it’s a time to stop leaving money on the table and get back to where it was left by the customers.

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Joe Parker

We boast of the best in the industry plugins for eCommerce systems and has years of experience working with eCommerce websites. We provide best plugins for platforms like - Magento, Prestashop, OpenCart and Shopify . We also provide custom module development and customization services for the website and modules..

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