61.45% Shopping Cart Abandon Rate - How to troubleshoot?

[JerDoggMckoy]

Hello MozPeeps! I wanted to see if I could get some help on the best method for troubleshooting our abandoned shopping cart funnel. Maybe point me in the best areas to research, or what are the best tools to use, or an improved method for analyzing and interpreting the existing data for more clarity about what is happening.

I have attached the screen shot that shows what's going on. This account is using a Magento shopping cart with a custom built checkout page that is trying to copy Overstock.com's checkout page.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Use Clicktale to monitor the checkout pages in question to try and get a feel for what people are doing or why they are clicking off?

2. Use another tool (not sure which one) that allows us to monitor page load speeds for the checkout process to see if orders are being hung up by slow loading pages.

3. Or, maybe 62% is not an uncommon abandoned cart rate and therefore we should just focus on automating abandoned cart follow up emails for the customers.

Thanks in advance for any help!

funnel-goal-visualization.jpg

[linztm]

The tool that I use to check is an add-on for Chrome called "Page Speed"- super helpful in analyzing page load times and gives suggestions on how to fix these errors. I believe they have an add-on for Firefox as well.

[STPseo]

A couple things we looked at when it comes to abandoned carts was shipping and tax. We'd often get comments that our shipping rates were too high. If you wait until the last minute to show them these additional costs... you can expect more carts to be abandoned.

Also - if you run promos you want to make sure the customer can see any discount. If there are problems with a promo or if you apply the discount after the order is finalized, the customer may think it is not working and will abandon the cart.

Another thing - if you suspect orders are being dropped during authorization - if possible try and pull the data from the cart as soon as the button is clicked. Make this a server side collection so you don't need to wait for or relay on any third party connection. Then you can compare your data with the final order data to make sure they are all going through.

Hope this helps!

[RyanKent]

PageSpeed and YSlow are both great tools, and I can confirm they both work in FF.