Jul 21 2008
Shopping Cart Abandonment
Before we talk about reducing shopping cart abandonment we need to understand what it is and the reasons why it exists. Shopping Cart Abandonment is nothing more than a customer visiting your online retail website, adding products to the shopping cart but leaving before completing the sale. A study done by MarketingSherpa estimates the average shopping cart abandonment rate to be 59.8%. That is the total numbers of customers that completed a sale divided by the total numbers of customers that added an item to the shopping cart. There are several reasons for this.
According to recent surveys by BizRate.com, a shopping search engine. The main reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:
- High shipping prices (72%)
- Comparison shopping or browsing (61%)
- Changed mind (56%)
- Saving items for later purchase (51%)
- Total cost of items is too high (43%)
- Checkout process is too long (41%)
- Checkout requires too much personal information (35%)
- Site requires registration before purchase (34%)
- Site is unstable or unreliable (31%)
- Checkout process is confusing (27%)
A recent survey conducted by comScore for PayPal estimated that consumers abandon their shopping carts for the following reasons:
- 43% shipping charges were too high
- 36% total cost of the purchase was more expensive than anticipated
- 27% like to comparison shop at other Web sites before making a purchase
- 16% could not contact customer support to answer questions
- 14% forgot their usernames and passwords for their store accounts created with the merchants
That same survey found that online comparison shopping is a common reason for checkout abandonment. More than 25% of customers wanted to compare items at online and offline stores before making a purchase. However, more than 33% of those who abandon at checkout said they returned to the web site at a later time to complete the sale.
So, why do nearly 60% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing the sale? The answer is that they lose trust, are surprised with unexpected charges or become frustrated with the process.
Now that we know what most of the problems are. We can work on solutions to improve the conversion rate of our online retail stores. In order to decrease shopping cart abandonment and increase sales, simple minor improvements in automation can be highly effective just by downloading and installing some contributions from the Zen Cart website.
