2019 Retail Ecommerce Remarketing Report

In our latest infographic, we look at abandonment rates, trends, and cart abandonment email performance from more than 250 retail clients.

Some highlights from the report, which looks at eight different types of retail websites:

Trends in Abandonment Rates

Abandonment rates often fluctuate through the year, and different types of retailers will experience peaks at certain times.

One common factor is that sales and promotional periods tend to product lower abandonment rates. For example, abandonment rates on Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be 5% to 10% lower than average.

The trends chart shows this pattern, with lower abandonment rates during the post Christmas sales period in January, and a sharp rise in February after promotions end.

Retail Cart Abandonment Rates

We’ve split our retail data up into eight different types of retailers so we can give you an idea of how abandonment rates vary.

By doing this, we can see very different rates across the eight retail types. So we can see that, at 72%, online grocery sites have the lowest rates of cart abandonment.

This reflects the way such sites work. Shoppers need to register or sign in as well as selecting a delivery slot before they add groceries to their basket, so they’ve overcome several normal barriers to purchase.

In addition, with groceries being a regular purchase (perhaps weekly, fortnightly) for most people, there’s more commitment to completing the order.

At the other end, the highest abandonment rates are for jewellery sites (88.6%) and homewares & DIY (88.36%).

Homewares and DIY purchases can be expensive (sheds, power tools etc) or require plenty of thought and planning so it’s understandable that people may abandon because they need more time to consider.

Jewelry can also be expensive, and is often bought as a gift. As such, it’s likely to be a one off or relatively infrequent purchase which people will take time to think about.

Factors like price and product type may affect abandonment rates, but that doesn’t mean retailers can’t do anything about it.

For example, some DIY retailers will experience abandonment rates below the average, and this is often because they have worked hard to improve the user experience, or have addressed some of the issues that cause abandonment, such as providing key product information or a choice of payment methods.