Shopping Cart Abandonment: Why shoppers leave without Payment? In the terms of online shopping, shopping cart is a software which acts as an interface between online shopping store’s inventory and buyers’ decision. It allows customers to select and manage items by allowing modifications and addition of more items in the list. Shopping carts are in fact a stand-alone software which can be integrated into various e-commerce sites to facilitate their customer and merchandise management. When do we say “A shopping cart has been abandoned”? In the world of online shopping, shopping cart is said to be abandoned when a particular virtual cart has been left unattended after loading items into it. I mean a customer visits your site, take a look around your items, select some or one of them to buy, adds them in the virtual cart and just before making the payment, he leaves the cart and decides not to buy. This orphan cart is said to be an “Abandoned cart”. Why shoppers leave without making the payment? There are shoppers who visit, look around, add items and then leaves without making a payment. What could be the reason for this? Why did they leave? Why out of every 100 potential customers, 67 leaves without making the payment? It is a pain for each and every online retailer. Here, I am discussing some of the very important reasons for the shopping cart abandonment. Let’s have a look:1.
Customer discovers hidden costs while making the final checkout
A large number of customers leave the cart abandoned when they encounter with the additional hidden charges at the time of final checkout. There are several reasons for that a) Addition of some special taxes : Customers find an unexpected increase in the checkout amount because of the addition of some extra taxes like service tax, which is not shown in the original page. b) Addition of shipping cost: Customers may find that they are getting the same item without any shipping charges from another site. 2.
Shopping website is very slow or it crashes more often
Customers gets frustrated when they find a website to be slow. Many website owners host their website on poor performing servers, which is one of the reason why customers leave a site and decide to buy from other alternative faster website which makes a impact on their overall eCommerce conversion rates. 3. Absence of Customer Information Websites who do not deploy an email tracking system lose a large amount of potential
customers in bulk. If companies do not get their customers verified before allowing them to add items in the cart, then it is impossible to get any customer tracked. For tracking a particular customer, one needs to ask the email id of the customer and get it verified by OTP or some other method. This helps to establish a communication between store and customers through email alerts or SMS alerts. Store owners can send offers to their customers through emails and SMS to get these potential customers back on their site for higher conversion rate optimization and sales. 4. Websites have a slow and lengthy checkout process Some websites have a very long and slow checkout process. They ask large number of details before allowing customers for final checkout. This makes the customer irritated and finally customer closes the window without checking out. Websites having concise and simple checkout process are preferred more by customers due to its ease of checkout. Example of a short and relevant checkout is shown in the figure below. 5. Customer finds much less price of the same item on other website While doing some research, customer may find out that the price of the same item is comparatively much lesser on other website. There may be other competitive advantage such as other website may not be charging shipping cost for the same item or it may be giving a decent discount. So, the customer decides to buy from the cheaper one and leaves the present cart as abandoned. 6. No Secure transaction on a website If customers don’t find any trusted logo on the checkout process, they think that the page is not secure for the online payment. Trusted logo are the seals given on a page indicating which security software or payment gateway they are using to make the payments secure. For example Mcafee Secure, Norton secured or any other such trust badges. 7. Customers do not find their payment option in the list. There are numerous payment methods through which a customer can make the payment of any purchase. Some customers might have a visa debit card while some may have a MasterCard or any other credit card for making the purchase, if you are not including popular payment methods in your checkout process, your sales activity is bound to be affected. Some of the other examples of payment methods are Internet banking, cash on delivery, PayPal, Pay u money, AMEX, etc. Shopping cart abandonment is not just an issue but its a threat to e-commerce business, where the sites are unable to retain their customers. Even if, they are somehow able to draw the customers to their site, retaining the customers till the checkout is done, seems to a very tough task to do. Sites are also facing this threat because of the increased business competition from rival sites. In order to understand the reasons behind shopping cart abandonment and adopt suitable measures, the above article might be very helpful.