Demystifying the mysteries of Shopping Cart Abandonment - Part 1/3

This post is global in nature and the insights are true for all countries. The post will be a three-part series covering the following:

1. Reasons for shopping cart abandonment


2. Ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate


3. Ways to bring back the customers to complete their purchase after they have abandoned the shopping cart.

I have broken up the post in three parts on purpose because I want the reader to, understand, analyze and debate my viewpoint. By the end of the third series, I’m hopeful that you will be able to understand scientifically and reduce the shopping cart abandonment numbers on your site in order to close sales and increase online revenue and justify your online presence.

Let’s start with the first part of the series - Reasons for shopping cart abandonment.

So, you have done your homework, worked it out with your agency and created the website for your company. You have even optimized the website for google, yahoo, bing etc. Your website also has social elements that make it optimized for social media. It gets lots of unique visitors from first month and they do visit your shopping cart section. Kudos. It’s a job well done. Now you can rest a bit. But wait, what’s happening here. Why are these visitors suddenly abandoning my cart without completing the purchase? Something’s wrong…
But what? …After all you followed the rules to building a website to the T. So what happened?

If you are in this situation, then you are not alone. Every year lots of webmasters worldwide realize that even after designing their website by following all the rules in the manual for website designing, lots of shoppers abandon the shopping cart without making a purchase. Take a look at the stats below.

But why do shoppers abandon the cart… They did actually start the process of shopping, didn’t they?. Then, why did they leave?
Surveys conducted to understand this behavior asked the visitor abandoning the shopping cart to complete the sentence:
‘I am not able to complete this purchase because _______________.’ The answers received were very insightful. The below graph lists down the answers with percentages:

It highlighted that comparison shopping, shipping costs, unavailability of time, no stock and uncomfortable buying processes were the top five reasons why a shopping cart was abandoned. Internet with its advantages of lesser inventory costs, huge knowledge pool and easier access has led to a scenario of Research Online and Purchase Offline (ROPO). As a result, you will observe lots of people on internet doing comparison shopping.

One of the best ways to identify such people is through their search queries. Consider a person who wants to purchase Reebok ZigZag shoes. During comparison shopping stage his query to a search engine would be ‘good jogging shoes’. Note that here he is not using any brand name or product identity. As he progresses through the purchase funnel – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) – his search query changes. When he is ready to make the purchase, he is in the Action stage. He now knows exactly what he needs to buy. His research and journey through the funnel has helped him to identify the exact brand (Reebok) and he knows the exact product identity (ZigZag). Now if he decides to make the purchase online, he will be in your shopping cart section. We will cover how to target such people in my second series of this post (Ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate Part-II). We will discuss of the various ways that can be implemented to tackle each of the reasons identified above due to which the visitor has abandoned your shopping cart.

Sneak-peak into ‘Ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate:
Part 2’

So, the good news is that now since we know the ‘why’ we can answer the next question ‘how’ How do we reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate? Through my experience over the years in this industry, I have found that, there are ways to reduce this abandonment rate. In fact, these ways are very simple to implement. Logical too. After all marketing is but simple logic......