Fear Of Addition A Key Cause Of Abandoned Shopping Carts
Written by Evan SchumanMay 30th, 2008
About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.
The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.
-Marc
May 30th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Some people are working on line at work, tring to shop at the same time and tring to shop, that’s why shopping carts are abandon too. (to much going on at work. About 68% of online shopers, shop from there work desk. mmm…. how about that. mmm…
May 30th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Slater makes a fine point as a large percentage of shoppers tend to shop between 1 and 4pm during the week. This may be why it is integral that website have perpetual shopping carts so that customers can go back to them and not lose their items. May be a fine time for a lot more websites to send their customers kind ‘reminders’ of what is left in their shopping cart or maybe devise a cool, ‘remind me’ button for customers who want to return to their ‘shopping’ during their next lunch hour – I’d like that! As for giving up on username and password, well this is getting to be a little epidemic with all sites requiring accounts or customers feeling like they should create one. I adhere to the same one for all, but a lot of people create 1 to 3 accounts and never remember which one they use with regularity. Funny how people keep fudging this up.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for the information, It surprises me PayPal does not share this with their merchants.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I wrote about this yesterday (my blog entry was titled “Curbing Online Shopping Cart Abandonment), to which one of my readers shared the following:
“Funny that you should post this today. I acutally abandoned an online shopping cart today because they told me that they would not leave my UPS package without a signature (and there was no other shipping option). I understand them not wanting to deal with stolen merchandise, but there is no guarantee that I or anyone else will be home when the package arrives, so how can I sign for it? That’s why I cancelled my order. I’ve left other carts because by the time I got through having to set up an account (which I will rarely use), I decided that I really didn’t need to get the items I considered purchasing. It would be nice if the entire order form could be on one page.”