1. Understanding the buyer’s journey

To define the difference between an abandoned cart and an abandoned checkout, let’s first examine a typical buying path for online shoppers. 

• Search: In most cases, buyers start shopping with either a search or engaging with an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram.
• Visit: People visit your online store for the first time to see what you sell and what your business is about.
• Shop: These visitors scroll around choosing items that suit their preferences and budgets.
• Add to Cart: If they are interested enough in any product, they will add them to their shopping cart.
• Checkout: The shoppers enter the checkout process by filling in their shipping and payment information.
• Buy: They confirm their order and make payment.

2. Checkout abandonment vs Cart abandonment

• What is checkout abandonment? 

Checkout abandonment is when customers had finished adding items to their cart and entered the checkout process, but have not completed their purchase. 

• What is cart abandonment? 

Cart abandonment is when customers get to the point where they add items to their cart and decide to not make a purchase from then.

• The differences

The possibility of recovering cart abandonment is lower than checkout abandonment because customers abandoning carts have lower buying intent. Also, in cart abandonment, customers might not leave their contacts, such as email or phone number, so we cannot remind them.

To increase the conversion rate, some eCommerce websites eliminate the “add to shopping cart” step. Instead, customers go directly from the product page to the checkout page. 

3. Solutions for Abandoned Checkout

First and foremost, it is recommended that you should always invest in continuous list growth to build the pool of shoppers who have subscribed to the email newsletter. This can be done by asking for sign up via a pop-up, flyout, embedded form, etc. Also, you should use cart saver pop-ups so as to reduce the number of abandonment checkouts.

Last but not least, you should be using an email marketing service that could actually send out a cart abandonment and checkout abandonment email or SMS in order to bring your customers back. This could help you reach 5x the number of shoppers abandoning orders and recover as much as 18% of abandoned carts.

See more abandoned cart recovery methods.