Shopping Cart Abandonment Options for WooCommerce

Key Points: 

• WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box checkout page makes it tough to capture email addresses.
• Other platforms like Shopify have a better out of the box solution based on a multi-step checkout.
• Our WooCommerce developers were frustrated with the lack of email captures on checkout so they came up with a custom solution.
• Our custom plugin resulted in around 20% more carts being collected over scripts running through a 3rd party.
• This plugin and process seamlessly connects with MailChimp, Klaviyo or any email provider.
• We have the ability to install this custom plugin on your website.

The global average rate of cart abandonment is 75%. The average abandonment rate on mobile phones is 85.65% [source]. Most people that hit your checkout page don’t end up converting. It’s important to have a shopping cart abandonment process in place. Unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t make it easy to capture the email on the checkout page. 

We’ve had many clients choose eCommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce over WooCommerce because of a better shopping cart abandonment process. We love WooCommerce but the checkout page has always been a point of frustration. This is the reason our WooCommerce development team decided to create a custom plugin based on this pain point.

Why does WooCommerce struggle when it comes to capturing emails on the checkout page? They have a one-page checkout, meaning if people drop off the WooCommerce checkout page, the eCommerce store won’t collect the email. Shopify does a better job splitting up their checkout process into multiple steps so even if someone doesn’t complete the purchase, the retailer can send them reminder emails.

Why is it so important to capture the email address on the checkout page? If the customer doesn’t convert due to being distracted, price shopping or cold feet, you can lure them back in with information about the product that was in their shopping cart along with potential discounts. 

I recorded the video below to walk you through the difference between WooCommerce and Shopify’s checkout page. 

The beauty of our custom plugin is it doesn’t change any of the aesthetics of the WooCommerce checkout page. There are plenty of other plugins you can purchase like Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce that will change up the look and feel of the checkout page. Ours simply captures the email address. Below is how our process works and what’s unique about it: 

1. The first thing we did was move the “Email address” field to the top of the checkout. This allows us to capture the email as early as possible, increasing our ability to tie an abandoned cart to an email address for re-marketing.

2. We then add a small HTML snippet coupled with some lightweight javascript to transmit the email address to the database and associate it with the open cart.

3. We track the complete cart, # of items in the cart, cart total cost, and start time of the checkout. (see below)

4. When the customer completes the checkout we mark that cart as PAID (along with the duration of time it took for the customer to complete the checkout process).

**It should be noted that anytime someone makes a purchase, we are able to scrub them from the list so they don’t get sent an email, but we still retain all of the tracked cart data for analytics purposes.

5. We’re able to send all of the information we collect through our custom plugin directly into your email marketing provider. Whether you want to send a WooCommerce email (similar to the emails sent for order confirmation) or connect the data in MailChimp, the list will seamlessly connect.

Our integration runs natively on your domain, which is much less likely to be identified as a tracking script, subverting ad blockers and tracking script blockers. This results in around 20% more carts being collected over scripts running through a 3rd party. While there are plugins that can be purchased, when you work with our development team, we can get much more granular to customize to your wants and needs.