Shopping cart abandonment is a major concern and performance indicator metric for all eCommerce merchants, and a recent study and infographic posted by ConversionVoodoo found several issues affecting sales conversion and cart abandonment including costly shipping, complicated checkout processes and distrust in a merchant or website.
Overall eCommerce websites have a cart abandonment rate of 55 to 75 percent, which may seem high, but this includes many customers with no intention of purchasing right away. According to the ConversionVoodoo inforgraphic, many consumers adding items to their cart are not ready to purchase as 57 percent are just estimating shipping costs while 56 percent are saving items to their cart for later. While this can skew a merchant’s metrics on sales conversion and cart abandonment it’s not a bad thing overall as a shopper who starts a cart and abandons it is still more likely to convert than a consumer who hasn’t added items to a cart at all.
When consumers abandon a cart never to come back, very often this is due to shipping and delivery. It was found that 55 percent of cart abandonment occurred because the cost of shipping was too expensive while 24 percent of shoppers that abandoned a cart did so because a clear estimate on delivery time was not provided. Another issue is that the checkout process and/or creating a user account is too complicated. Merchants should try to minimize the number of pages and steps required to complete checkout and the amount of information collected on a single page. But on average an online checkout has 5.6 pages for the consumer to complete, with each page making it more likely a consumer will abandon the process.
User accounts with an online merchant can also be an issue of trust. It was found that 40 percent of online shoppers are hesitant to create a user account with a merchant because they expect to receive spam. Consumers may also abandon a transaction because they do not trust the website. This affects websites both small and large as only 65 percent of brands display security information, such as trust seals, during the checkout process.
There are many reasons a consumer may abandon the checkout process, but these shouldn’t all be seen as lost sales. There are many things merchants can do to reduce cart abandonment, from simplifying the checkout process to being upfront and clear about delivery options, costs and times. But keep in mind that consumers offer add items to their cart to compare shipping costs across merchants, or to save items for later, underscoring the importance of competitive shipping costs and post-abandonment consumer follow up processes.
For more information see the Infographic: How to Use Conversion Optimization to Battle Shopping Cart Abandonment from Conversion Voodoo
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