How to Recover Abandoned Carts with Push Notifications

Cart Abandonment is the black death for eCommerce businesses, resulting in Billions of dollars in losses.

According to one of the most robust studies - the average cart abandonment rate is over 70%!

Crazy.

Don’t despair though, there are ways to minimize abandoned carts. We’re going to explain one of the best ones - abandoned cart push notifications.

They’re powerful tools, and we’re going to show you exactly how to use them. Let’s get started by briefly looking at the main reasons why abandoned carts occur.

Why do Customers Abandon their Cart?

There are many reasons why customers abandon carts. Some of the most common are:

Unexpected costs like high shipping fees or hidden taxes
Buggy or complex checkout process
Mandatory registration
Slow or inconvenient shipping options
Lack of trust in data or financial security

These are all pretty low hanging fruit for you to tweak, fix and test. Make sure you:

Simplify your checkout flow
Use trust signals
Always offer a guest checkout option
Show all costs transparently

There’s also a more boring reason too - people just get distracted and forget to finish.

The kids are running around, the dog is barking, their boss asks why they’re doing online shopping at work, you get the picture….

This is where abandoned cart notifications really shine.

We’ll use them to remind the customer about their cart, sending them targeted messages that encourage them to return and complete their purchase.

Why Push Notifications for Abandoned Carts?

You can remind customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp and other channels.

On the Shopify App Store you can see plenty of Apps that help with each of these - and you should also consider them (especially email):

Push Notifications are in a league of their own though, and are simply the best channel.

Push notifications have the highest open rates and click through rates. They allow you to reach your customer in the most direct way possible, often showing up as the first thing a customer sees when they open their phone.

They’re direct, highly visible, and very effective.

Web vs Native App push notifications

There are two main kinds of push notification - web and native.

You can either send them to people who visited your website, or to customers who’ve downloaded your iOS or Android apps.

Let’s look at web push notifications first.

Setting up Abandoned Cart Notifications from your Web Store

Whichever CMS you use - Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, etc - there are plenty of tools you can use to set up push notifications.

Some good ones are:

PushEngage
OneSignal
VWO Engage (PushCrew)
iZooto
Webpushr
PushAssist
WonderPush

These all have slightly different setups, features, and price points.

But each will allow you to set up abandoned cart notifications to trigger when appropriate.

The setup generally involves adding some code snippets to your site, a little fiddling, and then you’ll be flying!

Sending Abandoned Cart Notifications from a Mobile App

Once you’ve got web notifications set up it’s time to think about apps.

Native eCommerce apps are like steroids for your eCommerce business, and are unmatched when it comes to targeting your most loyal customers.

If you already have mobile apps

If you already have eCommerce mobile apps, you likely either built them from scratch or used an app builder.

In the first case - speak to your developers and they’ll set them up with some native code and the SDK of whatever push platform you use.

If you used an app builder, either they have a pre-built feature for abandoned cart notifications or you’re out of luck. Ask them what’s possible, and if you don’t like the answer you should probably ditch them and switch to MobiLoud (which we’ll talk about next).

If you do not have mobile apps (yet)

MobiLoud is simply the best way to build native eCommerce apps.

We’re the only major eCommerce app builder that builds eCommerce apps for you from your existing site. We’re the only platform that lets you reuse everything from the web.

MobiLoud is vastly more affordable than native development, and far more flexible and powerful than app builders.

MobiLoud integrates with OneSignal, which you can set up to send push notifications however you like.

When it comes to abandoned cart notifications though, we built a dedicated feature that is more powerful.

How does it work?

MobiLoud apps send abandoned cart notifications autonomously, through local notifications, without using one signal.

Everything happens on the users’ device.

Our systems monitor their in-app carts continuously. When we detect pending items, and that the app is closed (in the background) - this triggers a timed notification sequence.

The sequence uses CRO best practices and powerful copywriting to bring them back to the cart page within the app and prompt them to take the final step. Simple but powerful.

This is all managed and controlled remotely by our team, but you can customize it too, adding your own branding and copy as you wish.

It’s the best way to send abandoned cart notifications from a mobile app. Read more about how MobiLoud works and how we can supercharge your mobile eCommerce game.

Abandoned Cart Notification Tactics

There are a few useful tactics to try out for your notifications that work for both the web and native apps.

The first one is to leverage FOMO aka Fear of Missing Out.

Scarcity and urgency are two of the most powerful principles of marketing psychology. If you can remind the user that stocks are running low, or prices are rising soon - this can really motivate them to get back and pull their credit card out.

Make sure though that:

You are being honest
You don’t overuse it
You make it clear, concise, and relevant

If you keep things subtle and transparent though FOMO abandoned cart notifications can work really well.

FOMO is like the stick, but the carrot is equally effective.

Give them an incentive to return.

Can you offer them something to sweeten the deal? Humans respond to incentives and your customers are no different!

Offer discounts, free shipping, or other benefits in the abandoned cart notification and you’ll see your conversion rate increase. You can also make the offer time-bound and combine this with the first tactic!

Finally, make it personal!

Whether it's on the web or your apps, a personal touch can work wonders.

Whatever data you have on the customer - from their name to the specific items in their abandoned cart - working that into your messages will make them more powerful.

These are the foundations, beyond this it's a good idea to test different sequences and message formats to see what works optimally.

Get Started with Abandoned Cart Notifications Today

We’ve covered the foundations of abandoned cart notifications in this article.

In summary:

Abandoned carts are common and cost eCommerce companies Billions
Nudging them to complete checkout can massively boost revenue
You can (and should) do this through both web and app push notifications
Plenty of tools exist to set them up for the web, and MobiLoud covers the app side
You should use urgency, incentives, and personalization to boost performance

Of course it’s important to follow general best practices, and continuously measure everything and tweak things until you hit maximum performance.

At MobiLoud you can see the performance of all your notifications through simple dashboards, and our notification flows are designed with all the most crucial best practices.

The abandoned cart notifications we handle, but you'll also have full freedom to send all kinds of other notifications however you choose.

We give you everything you need to succeed not just with abandoned cart notifications but on mobile eCommerce in general - and our platform is proven with thousands of brands including top retailers like Bestseller, Rainbow and many more.