How to Prevent Online Shopping Cart Abandonment With Heat Maps and Visitor Recordings

In this article I’ll explain how to prevent online shopping cart abandonment by optimizing your checkout process with Hotjar visitor recordings.

Most industries have a 60-80% cart abandonment rate.

This is what’s considered normal.

Only a fraction of people who add products to the shopping cart in your online store will ever complete the checkout. For many new e-commerce store owners this is a nasty surprise.

You launch your store and get your first visitors.

But then almost everyone abandons the cart without ever buying your product. I remember running a free plus shipping offer last year and getting thousands of add to carts. It’s exciting to see people adding your product to the cart until you check your stats and realize you have a 90% cart abandonment rate. This is common with free plus shipping offers.

Take a look at these stats from one  of my Facebook campaigns:

Of 4,022 people who clicked on the ad, more than 50% added the product to the cart.

That’s a really good add to cart ratio. But the cart abandonment rate was around 90%, meaning only 10% of people who added the product to the cart actually bought it.

So 2,445 add to carts resulted in only 247 purchases.

It was still a wildly profitable campaign with great profit margins.

The cost per purchase was €2.35.

I was charging €7.99 for shipping and handling and the product cost around €1.50. This resulted in a profit of more than 50% which is why the numbers ended up working anyway.

But how do you prevent online shopping cart abandonment?

I’ve talked about 8 ways to lower your cart abandon rate in another article.

In this article I’ll specifically talk about how to use Hotjar visitor recordings to optimize your checkout process and prevent online shopping cart abandonment.

What Are Visitor Recordings?

There are different tools that allow you to create heat maps and visitor recordings of your website visitors. With heat maps, you can see which areas of your website are given most attention. You can also see which links, menus or images people click on.

But visitor recordings are even more fascinating.

Visitor recordings are short recordings that let you see what a visitor is doing on your site. And if you watch and analyze hundreds of these visitor recordings, you’ll start to recognize patterns. You’ll be able to identify red flags during your checkout process. And you’ll understand better why people are abandoning the cart. The tool I personally use is Hotjar.

They have a free plan that allows you to record 100 website visitors at a time.

All you have to do is install Hotjar’s tracking code on your website (kind of like you would do with a Facebook pixel or Google Analytics tracking code), and you’re all set.

The cool thing about visitor recordings is that you can legally “spy” on your visitors.

For example, I realized a lot of people were abandoning the cart because they got distracted by menus and related products. So I built an optimized sales page in Clickfunnels and removed all distractions that resulted in cart abandonments. This included removing the menu.

This helped prevent online shopping cart abandonments on one of my drop shipping stores. As a general rule, less is usually more when it comes to web design and conversion rates.

So how can you use this in your own business?

How to Prevent Online Shopping Cart Abandonment with Hotjar

First of all, get a Hotjar account.

As I mentioned already, it’s 100% free if you stick to 100 visitor recordings.

I never had a need for more visitor recordings and I’ve never used one of Hotjar’s paid plans. Whenever I have accumulated hundred visitor recordings, I watch and analyze them. Once I’m done, I delete all recordings and start recording again until I have hundred new ones.

Here’s an example of how I use visitor recordings:

Some people have wondered if this is legal?

I recommend reading Hotjar’s Data Safety, Privacy and Security documentation.

It makes sense to update your privacy policy accordingly.

For more information, and additional protection, it’s best to seek advice from a lawyer or law firm who understands the local laws and regulations of the territory you operate in.

Unfortunately I’m not a lawyer so I cannot give any legal advice.

That being said, what should you look out for? How can Hotjar help you prevent online shopping cart abandonment or at least significantly lower your cart abandonment rate?

What To Track

There are a few things that should be on your “radar”.

Visitor recordings give you a lot of raw information. In order to use these insights to lower your cart abandonment rate, you need to know what to look for in the first place.

Here are some things you should track:

• How long are people staying on your product page?
• How fast do people scroll? Do they skim or read attentively?
• Are visitors getting distracted by something?
• What grabs your visitors attention? What interests them most?
• What makes them click away from their shopping cart?
• What else could be hurting your conversion rate?

These are good questions to ask yourself when watching and analyzing visitor recordings. They’ll help you prevent online shopping cart abandonment where it can be prevented.

For example:

If you notice that people spend a lot of time looking at product reviews, it might be a good idea to focus on getting great reviews. You might also want to improve the layout or display of your review section. If you notice people get distracted by the similar products section, you might want to remove this section. You might be surprised by what you discover.

Your job is to remove obstacles that prevent customers from completing their purchase. The more visitor recordings you watch, the better you get at optimizing your website.