Website Conversion Blog
Last year, 154 million people in the U.S. made online purchases amounting to $155.2 billion in sales, or approximately $1000 each, according to recent Forrester research. But these are just the ones that made it through the process: ever since the very first online purchase in 1979, significantly more people abandoned shopping carts than complete their purchases.
The shopping cart abandonment rate is currently 71 percent. That means that more than 7 out of every 10 customers that start a shopping cart process fail to complete it. And during 2009, 88 percent of U.S. online customers abandoned at least one shopping cart, or 136 million people in total.
The reasons why website visitors abandon shopping carts haven’t changed much either. Another Forrester study shows that the cost of shipping is still the number one cause, and it has been for years. In fact, the top five causes of shopping cart abandonment are:
- Shipping and handling costs were too high 44%
- I was not ready to purchase the product 41%
- I wanted to compare prices on other sites 27%
- Product price was higher than I was willing to pay 25%
- Just wanted to save products in my cart for later consideration 24%
Note respondents were able to give multiple answers
What’s interesting is that all of the top five reasons for abandoned shopping carts have nothing to do with the checkout process itself. These are bigger behavioral issues, related to the visitor not being ready or related to price.
Many ecommerce teams instinctively think that tuning the checkout process is the top priority when they consider increasing their website conversion rate (and reducing the shopping cart abandonment rate). In March, we polled a group of 663 ecommerce executives and online marketers and asked them what was required to have a high converting website.
The top answer given was, not surprisingly, ‘Free Shipping’ (although many ecommerce teams know that this may be very difficult to deliver), followed by ‘Guest Checkout,’ ‘Simple, Intuitive Process,’ and finally ‘Short Checkout.’ This reflects our pre-occupation with tuning shopping cart processes. In years gone by the checkout process was one of the top reasons that visitors abandoned, but as the Forrester data shows, this is now much less of a problem.
SeeWhy also conducted some research into website conversion best practices. In Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites, we looked at what these websites do to achieve ten times higher website conversion rates than the average website conversion rates. One of the primary lessons learned was that tuning the website really isn’t all that important. In fact, only one out of the top ten sites offered a guest checkout, and most had not optimized their checkout process.
So, what the Forrester research points to is what many ecommerce teams already know: tuning the website to make the checkout process smoother is only part of the answer. In fact, many have learned that once you’ve tuned, they are still seeing high abandonment rates — perhaps reduced somewhat, but still frustratingly high.
The other area to look at is what you can do to recover abandoned shopping carts. Following up on abandoned shopping carts enables you to tackle the bigger behavioral issues: what can you do to increase the conversion rate for those customers when they are not yet ready to buy or those with an issue on price?
This is where remarketing is absolutely essential. Website visitors that have just abandoned a shopping cart are your very best prospects. After all, they almost purchased…but didn’t quite.
Something stopped them.
Experience tells us that it’s better not to try and second guess the reasons why website visitors abandon shopping carts — there are just too many potential and unique circumstances outside of your control.
What continues to amaze me is that so few currently remarket to their site visitors (16 percent of the Etail 500), despite this being so well proven as a technique in driving sales. Amazon, after all is one of the biggest proponents of remarketing, yet it is done so subtly than many don’t realize that they are being remarketed to.
Tags: abandoned shopping cart, ecommerce, reasons why, top ten converting websites, website conversion
Another reason is requiring the customer to create an account before checking out. Creating an account should be optional.
Hi Christina
Thanks you’re right and you raise a good point – providing a guest checkout can also be important. In fact the Forrester study ranked it as the 7th most popular reason that web buyers gave for abandoning a purchase. 14% said that they had abandoned shopping carts because they did not want to register with the site.
What’s also interesting about guest checkouts is that only two out of the top ten converting websites offers a guest checkout. Four out of the top five, and eight out of the top ten force a full registration before a first purchase. Amazon, which is number 11 in the list, also forces a full registration.
This is in many ways counter-intuitive, and it was one of the reasons that we set out to study the top ten and what they do differently. Looking at website conversion rates, the top ten converting websites convert on average 23 percent of visitors to sale in the same session, whereas on average the ecommerce sector converts only 2-3 percent.
You can read more about this here
http://seewhy.com/blog/2010/04/19/website-conversion-techniques-1/
which is one of a series of three blogs on the subject.
There’s also a free report you can download here
http://seewhy.com/top-ten-converting-websites.htm
Thank you for commenting!
Charles
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Makes perfect sense — especially the free shipping offer bit. I’ve also heard that security plays a rather large role in whether or not shopping carts get abandoned, which is an angle VeriSign (who I work for) has addressed quite a bit. The implication being that an untrustworthy site is unlikely to get as much business as a trustworthy one — and protective measures such as EV SSL, or security seals like the VeriSign Trust Mark (which provides daily malware scanning and seal-in-search features) are more likely to suggest trustworthiness. It often does come down to cost as well, though.
Thanks for a good comment Joseph.
I went back and checked the original Forrester research and they didn’t mention security seals. But your point is totally valid, and goes to the emotional side of buying (or not).
I blogged about this a year ago based on a different survey which did look at trustmarks, and you may find this article interesting as well: http://seewhy.com/blog/2009/08/16/why-we-buy-online/
It’s hard to measure the emotional side of buying, but it’s really important.
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Fantastic Article. My reasons for abandoning my carts:
After the costs are totaled often the amount totals to what I would pay for in a store. The store purchase also allows me to touch, feel, try on, kick,and have the item immediately.
I feel I must be home for the delivery or the item might get stolen.
Packaging and recycling are always on my mind and becomes a deciding factor in leaving my cart full and unpurchased.
Finally, and most importantly, the carts are also abandoned because I decided to shop uncontrollably and am shocked by my grand total. I have never chosen the option to remove individual items, I just close the site.
Hi Lane – Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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The last 3 times I abandoned a cart was because the coupon (free shipping) that was sent via email by the store didn’t show up as being deducted in the cart. Twice, I contacted the customer service and was told the deduction would appear after entering the credit card info on the final page. I don’t know what reasons are behind having it like that. Seems counterintuitive to me.
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We have done A/B testing with Guest checkout and consistently find that while it reduces abandonment on the login page, the over all Sale Conversion Rate does NOT improve or only improves by a fraction.
Many angles are at play there… how is it all implemented? Currently we suspect that users who choose ‘Guest Checkout’ expect not to have to enter an email. But this remains to be confirmed. Meanwhile I have found no evidence that any site reports a proven significant conversion improvement due to Guest Checkout.
What exactly do users expect? A FASTER checkout? A more ANONYMOUS checkout? A one page checkout? What does your research into Guest options show?
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