As digital transformation accelerates worldwide, growth in online shopping has created opportunities not only to reimagine brand relevance, but also to rethink the end-to-end customer experience. Dr. Tiffany Raymond, head of global customer advocacy, at PayPal, talks with eMarketer editorial director at Insider Intelligence Rimma Kats, about steps you can take to optimize your product, cart and checkout pages to help reduce cart abandonment, improve conversion, increase spend and boost customer loyalty.

Faster checkout helps merchants avoid friction-induced cart abandonment—leading to higher conversion and higher sales volume. Solutions like one-click checkout let customers avoid inputting payment information at checkout, which can be time-consuming and prone to error.

Integrating Bolt lets Adobe’s merchants offer a faster and more convenient checkout experience for their customers—which can reduce online cart abandonment and boost sales volume. The integration also helps online merchants compete with Amazon, which 77% of US consumers say they’re more inclined to shop with because of its easy checkout process, per Fast.

And simplified checkouts can help increase conversion and decrease cart abandonment. Last year, 73% of global online businesses cited cart abandonment as an issue, per Paysafe. Fast CEO Domm Holland told Insider Intelligence that the company’s solution has increased conversion rates by as much as 60%.

The average conversion rate for campaign emails was 6.5%, lower than that of browse abandonment (7.6%), post-purchase (15.4%), product abandonment (17.3%), and cart abandonment messages (37.5%).

eMarketer recently spoke with Vadim Grinberg, vice president of consumer growth and insight at Dagne Dover, to discuss what the retailer has learned since opening up its pop-up location and how it feels about retail tech and handles cart abandonment.

On Cyber Monday, social referral traffic had a 2% conversion rate and 94% cart abandonment rate, compared with a 12% conversion rate and 80% cart abandonment rate for search traffic. Across the key shopping holidays, social shoppers generated a single-digit share of traffic and an even lower share of orders, while search shoppers generated similar traffic but a disproportionately high share of orders.

Amazon Pay’s seamless one-click checkout reduces shopper friction, thereby improving convenience, cutting into cart abandonment, and growing sales. It can make payments a nonissue for users—allowing Amazon to emphasize other parts of its growth strategy—while also tightening relationships with customers even when they aren’t shopping with Amazon.

"This has resulted in increased cart abandonment, as buyers are seeing higher prices at checkout and are purchasing less," she said. eBay will continue to feel the effects as more states implement the internet sales tax laws, at least for H1 2020. But its challenges extend beyond just internet sales tax.

The conversational commerce channel has helped the company with an issue troubling nearly all retailers—cart abandonment. “On mobile, you're so much more distracted,” Egan said. “We're trying to test that window that people find as a helpful reminder vs. something that’s annoying. We only send one cart abandonment message, and we’re testing when that should be sent—an hour after? Is it 24 hours?

Capitalizing on Cart Abandonment. The overwhelming majority of online shopping carts are abandoned, so cart abandonment messaging is a must for retailers. However, only 50% of the 250 brands send cart abandonment messages, and even fewer capitalize on them. Just 24% of retailers include additional personalized recommendations in their cart abandonment messaging.

Of the 250 retailers ranked, 50% send abandoned cart emails and 24% include personalized product recommendations within those messages. Among the top 25, 84% sent cart abandonment emails and 68% made additional personalized product recommendations within them, underlining the missed opportunity there. Who were the top performers and what else set them apart?

Amazon’s introduction of one-click ordering to alleviate shopping cart abandonment made online buying so easy it became habit. But that habit didn’t translate especially well to mobile, as page latency and difficult checkouts once again plagued conversions in this new context.

Email automation prompted by abandonment of a specific product or an entire cart, and even by website browsing, is viewed by recipients as highly relevant compared with batch-and-blast campaigns. Hashemi has found that for Uncommon Goods, category affinity is not as strong as it is for most retailers.