How E-commerce Bugs Can Lead to Higher Abandoned Cart Rate

Running an e-commerce business requires you to wear many hats.

You might be getting the manufacturing, marketing, and even the micro-fulfillment parts of your business right, but it would not matter if your website experience is glitchy or is derailed by bugs. What’s more, an error-ridden website can affect the online shopping experience, causing shoppers to abandon their purchases on your online store.

That said, there is a lot of merit in learning about the different kinds of e-commerce website bugs and how they can cause customers to abandon their carts. Identifying and fixing these errors in advance can prevent missed sales opportunities for sellers.

Let us start by understanding the definition of cart abandonment rate and why it is important for e-commerce sellers to calculate it.

What is Cart Abandonment Rate and Why is it Important to Calculate it?

Every e-commerce store faces the brunt of an abandoned purchase at some point, making it an important issue to address.

Cart abandonment is when a customer abandons their shopping cart in an online store after adding items to it. Many shoppers will create shopping carts if the online store lists high-quality and credible products. However, the online store’s shopping and user experience will decide whether the shoppers will go through with the purchase or abandon their carts.

Calculating the cart abandonment rate helps determine if your customers’ shopping experience is seamless or requires tweaks. Higher checkouts, lower cart abandonment, and a flawless user experience can help e-commerce sellers maximize their profit.

Your cart abandonment rate can be calculated by dividing the number of completed transactions by the number of shopping carts created and then subtracting the result from 1 and multiplying it by 100.

The formula for the cart abandonment rate is as follows:

Cart Abandonment Rate = 1 – (Transactions Completed/Shopping Carts Created) x 100

Now let us look at an example to gain a better understanding of this formula. Let’s assume that 200 carts were created in your online store during the Black Friday sale, and out of them, only 100 transactions were completed by your customers.

So the cart abandonment rate in this case will be:

= 1 – (100/200) x 100 [1-(Completed Transactions/Created Shopping Carts)]

= 1 – 0.5 x 100

= 0.5 x 100 = 50%

So the cart abandonment rate on your online store is 50%.

Top 13 E-commerce Bugs Leading to Higher Abandoned Cart Rate

1. Forcing Customers to Create An Account

Now that you know what the cart abandonment rate is and how to calculate it, let’s look at e-commerce bugs that influence cart abandonment. 

While not a bug, having a mandatory account creation process can lead to cart abandonment. E-commerce seller set this feature to default, forcing them to enter their contact information to complete a transaction. 

Imagine a potential customer discovering your website through an Instagram ad. The customer particularly liked a product you were selling, added it to their cart, and proceeded towards checkout but must create an account to proceed. As a result of this, customers not willing to sign up or provide their entire contact information might want to abandon their carts.

To prevent any negative impact on your cart abandonment rates, consider enabling guest checkouts on your website and not forcing customers to create accounts.

2. Complicating the Checkout Process

Any process that takes customers a considerably long time to shop on your online store carry out can become a reason for customers to abandon their carts. If your checkout process is longer than it should be, customers may abandon their shopping cart and payment.

Ensure that every form field in the checkout process is necessary and adds value. Remember that additional steps can prolong the process and prevent customers from finishing payment. Customers prefer to navigate checkout processes that are simple and convenient, so additional friction will prompt them to abandon their shopping carts.

As seen in the below image, Staples specifies the mandatory form fields and the ones that are optional to facilitate easier and faster checkouts.
To avoid this situation, opt for simple checkout processes, enable auto-fill forms, and allow customers to auto-save their details. These steps will even help you increase e-commerce checkout rates.

3. Slow Loading Times

Your e-commerce website is your digital storefront, so any delays in shoppers accessing the product catalog and navigating from one page to another will cause friction in customers’ purchase process. If your customers have already added products to their shopping carts, they are likely to move on with purchasing those products; however, any hurdle in the process can prompt them to abandon the transaction altogether.

This especially happens when your customer is making impulsive purchases. Say your customer has already added a product to the shopping cart but they are on the fence about completing the transaction. Slow loading of the payment page, delays in reflecting shipping times on the checkout page can result in the customer dropping off from your website.

4. Lack of Mobile-Friendliness

With more than half of global e-commerce transactions taking place on mobile devices, it would be a mistake for online stores to not be mobile-responsive. Gone are the days when customers would be okay navigating a buggy desktop version of your website on their mobile devices.

Today, your customers expect your website to have a mobile-first design with online stores scaled to fit their smartphones for some on-the-go shopping. Since many online stores now provide that, an incompatible mobile experience would result in customers not being able to complete the transaction, abandoning their shopping carts, and choosing to purchase from a competitor instead.

What’s more, since Google introduced the mobile-first index for ranking websites, adopting a mobile-first web design will even help you rank better on search engine results.

5. Payment-Related Bugs

Payment and related security issues are some of the most important roadblocks that keep customers away from online shopping. As an e-commerce seller, issues regarding payment processing, connectivity, and proper response messages may prevent shoppers from completing a transaction.

A major mistake that e-commerce retailers often make is revealing hidden costs or charges when the customer is about to proceed with the payment. In fact, it is among the top reasons leading to cart abandonment. Shoppers expect sellers to disclose information beforehand and not during the time of payment and such cases highlight the importance of pricing transparency.

Additionally, payment bugs can include slow loading of the payment gateway, gateway crashes, or even a specific payment method not working as expected. Payment failures can be very concerning to customers and prevent them from proceeding with an order or prompt them to abandon their purchase immediately.

Whether you are a small online storefront or an established seller, having the right payment gateways can help you appeal to a diverse demographic and help you go a long way in reducing your cart abandonment rates.

6. Broken Checkout Button or Icon

When customers on your online store try to checkout, a malfunctioning checkout button can derail a sale and result in drop-offs and abandoned carts. 

The root cause of these checkout bugs is often due to JavaScript errors or misconfigured links. Conduct regular technical audits of your website to identify such bugs in advance and resolve them promptly to prevent any loss of revenue.

7. Broken Return or Refund Policy Links

First-time shoppers on your online store are likely to assess every part of your website before deciding to make a purchase. A key aspect that weighs in on their purchase decision is your policies for processing returns and refunds.

The specifications of the policies themselves will play a pivotal role in determining whether a customer will choose to buy from your online store. Make sure that return and refund specifications are accessible to shoppers so that they can verify terms and proceed with a purchase.

Like the broken checkout button bug, this bug can also be identified and eliminated in advance with regular technical audits of your website.

8. Inconsistent Images/Descriptions

Some e-commerce bugs can perform unpredictably and cause your product pages or other vital data on your website to malfunction. This is a difficult challenge as your product pages help customers to buy from your online store.

Imagine displaying a product page for a face wash and images showing a moisturizer or lipstick when they click on the thumbnail to explore further. For a first-time customer, this mismatch could prompt them to abandon the purchase. Even if they go ahead with the order without noticing the bug, there is always a risk that the customer might abandon their cart at any point.

9. Inventory-Related Bugs

Tracking and updating your inventory stock is necessary to ensure that your online store always displays the right product for shoppers. Inventory-related bugs are serious because they can lead to cart abandonment and break down your supply chain process.

If your online store displays a product despite being out of stock, the fulfillment timeline is longer since the replacement should arrive at the warehouse on time or it is very likely the customer will get frustrated and abandon their cart. 

In an alternate scenario, if a customer has added five products to their shopping cart, out of which two products are out of stock, they are likely to abandon the cart and then proceed with a part of their order.

10. Multistep Process Bugs

A typical online store is likely to have several multi-step processes, however, the checkout process is probably one of the most important ones. Checkout processes in most online stores have multiple steps including confirmation of product details, shipping details, and payment details.

Such multi-step processes are prone to bugs that can cause a specific screen to freeze or a step to fail. Some bugs can even redirect customers to the previous screens and put the entire process in a loop causing them a lot of frustration. In such cases, customers might end up abandoning their shopping carts.

11. Errors in Forms

For most customers, signing up for an online platform or adding endless details after they have added products to their cart is the least likable part of shopping online. Forms within a checkout process should be user-friendly.

Forms with errors or bugs such as incorrect field validation or optional fields being marked mandatory, can diminish the quality of your checkout process. Additionally, some errors don’t let customers proceed with the process without specifying what went wrong. These errors can dissuade customers and make them abandon their purchases.

While most customers may try to navigate the form again, if the errors persist or lead to bigger bugs, they are likely to leave the website.

12. Bugs or Lack of Clarity in Discount Codes

More often than not, potential customers buy from an online store because of the discounts and coupons they offer. Many customers even discover your online store to leverage discounts or coupon codes. If these discounts and offers do not work properly, customers might abandon their shopping carts.

13. Session Timeouts and Cart Expiration

It is common for customers to take some time to make up their minds about proceeding with a purchase from an online store. Bugs that cause session timeouts or cart expirations can put unnecessary pressure on shoppers and lead them to abandon their shopping carts.

After all, customers would not prefer to shop from websites that force them to make an impulsive purchase or add products to the cart only to have them disappear after some time. To prevent this challenge from boosting your cart abandonment rate, online stores must enable guest checkout options that let customers take time to navigate the process.

Conclusion

The e-commerce industry is super-competitive, and online stores have to be at the top of their game to win over customers and boost revenue. Nothing is worse than having a customer land on your website, and add products to their shopping cart, only to abandon their purchase later. 

You must ensure that your online store does not face the aforementioned bugs so that customers can seamlessly finish their purchase and not face any friction in the process.