Shopping Cart Abandonment: The Prelude To The SaleOnline sales continue to grow at over 20% per year. Despite the success of e-commerce, many contemporary online consumers aren’t in any rush to click the
buy button. Instead, they spend days digitally window-shopping before making a purchase, abandoning shopping carts with an ease that frustrates and often confuses online retailers.
In recent years, a rise in shopping cart abandonment is due in large part to the rise of comparison shopping. As shoppers learned to use shopping carts as a comparison shopping tool, abandonment has become a natural precursor to purchasing. As a result, retailers need to win back potential customers who have come and gone without buying. To do that, they need to understand what influences a visitor’s original buy decision.
How Shoppers Choose
Many online shoppers use the Internet as a vast catalog of catalogs, typically visiting as many sites as they can easily find. At each site shoppers load the same or similar items into the shopping cart, conveniently comparing total costs, including shipping fees. Shoppers then return to buy based on two general categories:
1. Price and Availability
Do they have the exact product I want? Is it the model/color/design I prefer?
What are the added shipping costs?
How does the total price compare to other sites?
2. Safety and Trust
Do I trust this company? Will they send me the product quickly–or at all?
Will they honor any returns or warrantee problems?
Do I feel more secure giving my credit card and personal information to this site?
How Shoppers Buy: The Shopping Cart As Convenience Tool
The discovery of an important time delay between initial visit and actual purchase became apparent after analyzing the aggregate results of more than 150 A/B split tests conducted by ScanAlert’s customers. Scan Alert is a security auditing company that scans sites daily and certifies them through the HACKER SAFE certification program. Retailers such as GSI Commerce, Ritz Camera, Tiger Direct, Shari’s Berries and other less well known web sites ran the tests (tracking the behavior of over 9 million visitors to their sites) to determine the effects of ScanAlert’s HACKER SAFE certification mark on increasing sales conversion.
On average, sites recorded 14% more sales from those who saw the HACKER SAFE certification mark while shopping, compared to the number of sales from those who did not see the certification
mark.
Based on aggregate results, the average time delay between a consumer’s first visit to a web site and his/hers first purchase was just over 19 hours. About one-third (35%) of shoppers took more than 12 hours to make a buy decision. Twenty one percent took more than three days, with 14% of these “cautious shoppers” taking more than one week to decide where to buy.
Average Time from First Visit to Purchase
50% took more than 1 hour
40% took more than 3 hours
35% took more than 12 hours
28% took more than one day
21% took more than three days
14% took more than one week
4% took more than two weeks
Your Customers Decide to Buy From You After Leaving Your Site
The largest contributors to the delay between initial visit to actual purchase were competitive scope of product, followed by purchase price. Other secondary factors included customer age demographics, overall brand recognition, and the number of competitors online. In particular, the data suggest that shopping cart abandonment is actually a habitual part of many consumers’ shopping behavior.
The data also shows that shoppers spending the longest time shopping are the most concerned about the safety and security of the sites where they shop. The HACKER SAFE certification mark generated close to 20% higher conversion rates for customers who delay their purchase for more than 3 days.
Recommendations
For those who comparison shop the most, trust factors are a strong motivator when present, and potentially a strong barrier when absent. In fact, for a large number of shoppers, trust is the deciding factor. Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder and chief persuasion officer of FutureNowInc., notes, “relevance, trust and credibility are the critical factors to making a website persuasive; once you have the visitor interested if you can't establish trust and credibility, you will never persuade the visitor to take action. The highest priority for web site owners is to instill confidence in their visitors.”
With cautious shoppers more worried about online shopping security, they are thus more responsive to the appearance of security trust marks on sites. In addition to the empirical benefits of HACKER SAFE certification, two other recommendations to convert shoppers into buyers are:
Creating Comfort for Comparison Shoppers
ScanAlert’s survey data show a strong correlation between risk aversion and time spent considering or researching a purchase. Online merchants should emphasize safety and security to actively address window shoppers’ concerns and increase the likelihood that they will return to make a near-future purchase.
Moving the Sales Focus from Shopping Cart Abandonment to “Site Abandonment”
Abandoning the cart is simply the act of moving on to the next comparison. Shopping carts must therefore become convenient shopping tools, encouraging shoppers to return and buy.
Encouraging today’s digital window shopper to explore product information, and to gain a memorable sense of trust and safety while doing so, has a strong influence on the search for value. Armed with this new understanding, online retailers need to produce a shopping experience that is not only informative and secure, but also memorable and easy to which to return.
About the Author
Nigel Ravenhill is Director of Marketing for ScanAlert. ScanAlert is a security auditing company that makes web sites secure through comprehensive daily security audits and then certifies them through the HACKER SAFE certification program. ScanAlert currently protects and certifies more than 60,000 web sites in 30 countries. More information is available at www.scanalert.com
