A customer who reaches the cart but doesn’t complete the purchase represents one of the quietest losses in pet e-commerce because the product has already been chosen, the interest already exists, and yet the sale never closes. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, treats this stage of the journey as one that deserves the most attention, precisely because recovering that customer tends to cost far less than attracting a new visitor to the site.
Understanding why abandonment happens takes more than assuming the customer simply gave up on the purchase. Unexpected shipping costs, a delivery window longer than expected, or a checkout process that drags on too long tend to be the real reasons behind this behavior, and each one requires a different solution to reduce the abandonment rate over time.
Shipping revealed only at the end of the process drives customers away
Showing the product price without including shipping until the very end of checkout tends to generate frustration, especially when the final amount surprises the customer after they’ve already spent time choosing a product and filling in delivery details. This negative surprise is one of the most recurring causes of abandonment in any e-commerce, not just in the pet sector.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho recommends calculating and displaying estimated shipping as early as possible in the buying journey, even before the customer decides to finalize the order. This transparency reduces the sense of an unpleasant surprise at checkout, letting the customer decide with complete information from the very start of browsing the catalog.
A checkout that’s too long wears the customer out before they finish
Asking for excessive information, or splitting the process into many separate steps, increases the chance a customer will give up before completing the purchase, especially on mobile devices, where filling out a long form is even more tiring than on a computer with a physical keyboard available.
Enjoy Pets simplified its own checkout process by reducing required fields to the bare minimum, keeping only the information essential to properly process the order. Hugo Galvao considers this simplification one of the highest-impact adjustments for purchase completion rate, because it removes friction without requiring any additional paid media investment.
A recovery email works better when it arrives quickly
A customer who abandons their cart still has purchase intent that’s relatively fresh in the first hours after abandonment, which makes that period the most effective window for trying to recover that sale through direct communication, whether by email or another contact channel the customer authorized during browsing.
Hugo Galvao notes that a recovery message sent hours or days after abandonment loses much of its effectiveness because the original interest has already cooled or the customer has already met the need elsewhere. Setting up that contact to happen quickly, within the first few hours, tends to recover a meaningful share of sales that would otherwise be lost for good.
Reducing abandonment is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix
No isolated fix completely eliminates cart abandonment, because different customers abandon for different reasons at different points in the buying journey. Treating this indicator as a metric to be tracked continuously, testing small adjustments over time, tends to produce a more consistent result than a single one-off change to the checkout process.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho stresses that reviewing abandonment rate regularly, identifying at which specific step customers tend to give up, is what allows the operation to fix the right problem instead of applying a generic solution that doesn’t address the real cause behind that specific abandonment behavior within the store’s buying process.