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Shopping Cart Abandonment

Top 5 Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment has been a problem since Pizza Hut received the first online purchase in 1993. (Yep, 1993 and Pizza Hut, one would think their marketing department would know about that.) Several reasons exist as to why people leave after adding a product to their shopping cart; the following are the top five reasons for shopping cart abandonment.

1. Required to create an account prior to checking out
2. Window shopping
3. Too many steps in the checkout process
4. Shipping costs
5. The boss caught the shopper shopping

We recently completed a shopping cart study. Well, it’s a couple of years old, but we did it. Every shopping experience presents customers with “exit points” or barriers that cause enough pain or friction to cause them to leave the site. In an effort to understand how much the “create an account” requirement caused friction we presented 100 shoppers with the same sites.

Site #1: Required to Create an Account
Site #2: Create an Account or Checkout Anonymously
Site #3: No requirements or questions prior to the checkout page

The results were interesting. Site #2 presented an increase of 3% in conversions over Site #1. Site #3 resulted in an increase of 16% conversions compared to Site #1.

The conclusion was simple; remove the requirement to create an account and asking customers to make the decision to checkout anonymously.

After the study, we polled the participants to get their view about Site #2’s options. The participants that abandoned their cart without completing the checkout process said they felt they would still receive spam from company if they checkout anonymously. Of the participants that abandoned on Site #3, five stated they didn’t like the shipping costs.

Talking about shipping costs, I abandoned my cart at Best Buy when I discovered the shipping cost was $51.00. I decided to call a local store with the same item and get the item faster and at a lower cost.

Again, feel free to call us for more information on our Hosted Shopping Cart Solution.

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