In 2011, the shopping cart abandonment rate continued its rise, reaching a new all-time high of 72% by the end of the year. In this blog, I’ll try to answer why the shopping cart abandonment rate has risen, despite a focus on conversion optimization by many ecommerce sites. I’ll also explain why I predict that the shopping cart abandonment rate will continue to rise in 2012.
Everything is more exaggerated over the holiday period: Retailers offer a dazzling array of new products, coupled with equally dazzling promotions, while trying to manage the constant problem of out-of-stocks. And customers make an abnormal number of purchases in a very short period and abandon their shopping carts in droves as they search for the best deals. (…)
The theory goes that if you make it easy for visitors to follow a simple path to conversion, you’ll generate traffic and revenue.
And yes, this is correct.
But this “single track” view of conversion is overly simplistic.
In this column, let’s explore why, and how it’s important to consider all of your available conversion paths.
Why Customers Don’t Buy
Only 3 percent of visitors buy within one session on an e-commerce site. And once they get as far as the shopping cart, 71 percent will abandon. To understand why, Forrester Research asked 3,000 people why they abandon.
Source: Forrester Research, May 2010; “Understanding Shopping Cart Abandonment” Note: Respondents were able to give multiple answers
As it has been for years, the cost of shipping is still the number one reason why people abandon their online shopping carts. What’s interesting to note is that none of the top reasons have anything to do with the actual checkout process. They’re all behavioral and related to lack of readiness or willingness to pay the final purchase price.
So, making the checkout process easier for the first-time buyer is only part of the answer when addressing cart abandonment. In fact, many have learned that once changes are made, abandonment rates are still high.
Multiple Paths to Conversion
Visitors will make multiple visits to your site before finishing a sale. And on their journey, there are many different purchase paths they may follow.
After analyzing the online buying behavior of over 600,000 consumers across numerous e-commerce sites, I learned that surprisingly 75 percent of shopping cart abandoners would actually return to the site they abandoned within a 28-day period. This defies conventional wisdom: we polled online marketers and 81 percent believed that the majority of abandoners never return.
Additionally, these returning visitors are more likely to finish their purchase, as well as make future purchases. (…)
In 2006, a Wharton professor first noticed that online buyers were more likely to respond to a free shipping offer that resulted in a savings of $6.99 over an outright savings offer of $10. The explanation was that it made the online price more comparable with the offline equivalent.
This fascinating insight into buyer motivations has contributed to on a major new piece of research into online buyer behaviour, which I’ve been working on over the last few months. It will be published on December 13th as an ebook titled ‘The Science of Shopping Cart Abandonment.’
To mark Black Friday, I’ve drawn from some of this research to look at the effects of holiday promotions, and how different price points impact buyer behavior. In particular, I’ll look at the relationship between the cart value and the shopping cart abandonment rate.
What are key price points that trigger abandonment? And can different pricing tactics lead to more conversions without eroding margin? I began my research analyzing a random sample of 264,631 abandoned shopping carts in August 2011, from a cross section of B2C e-commerce sites.
What we already know is that the value of the shopping cart has a disproportionate impact on whether an e-commerce purchaser will buy or abandon. What we have discovered is that it’s not a linear relationship and too simplistic to assume this as a general rule. This leads us to conclude that there are three promotional tactics that merchants should test this holiday season to improve conversions:
Offer discounted shipping for low cost shopping carts.
Set a $99 minimum order for free shipping.
Consider specific promotions for individual products with varying abandonment rates.
1. Offer discounted shipping for low cost shopping carts. As might be expected, higher value shopping carts are abandoned more frequently, and as a broad rule, this holds true. (…)
It’s official: Free shipping is the shoppers’ top retail promotion of choice, driving the majority of customers to buy and to spend more than with any other promotion. This holiday season, customers will be even more price-sensitive, looking not only for the best prices, but free shipping and returns as well.
As we have written about before, customers have become trained to wait for holiday offers prior to making purchases. A tighter economy suggests that this holiday season should see good growth for ecommerce sites as consumers look online for the best prices. However, there is evidence that the 2012 consumer is also moving online to save money across a spectrum of goods, including luxury items. (…)
For many website visitors, the Online checkout user experience is far from intuitive. I just came across this great viral video from the Google Analytics marketing team on the online buying process. Taking the simple idea of what it would be like to have to go through an online shopping process in a physical store, there are many painful home truths exposed here in an amusing way.
The video follows a man trying to buy a loaf of bread in a British supermarket, but being forced to go through an online checkout process. What fun – it should resonate well with all ecommerce teams and user experience experts alike. It’ll also make you chuckle and cringe as well. What’s amazing is that it takes him so long before he abandons his shopping cart.
Enjoy!
Each year, thousands of eCommerce and retail folks shuffle through the EXPO halls and attend the panel discussions of the Shop.org Annual Summit, one of the best retail conventions of the year. With over 4,000 attendees, 2011 was possibly the biggest Summit to date. The content at Shop.org summit is always packed with great practical tips, advice and the opportunity to network with experts from different fields. You can see a summary of this year’s event, including many of the presentations here.
And after passing out around 500 mini-shopping carts to our booth visitors, watching over 350 people squeeze in to attend The Science of Shopping Cart Optimization panel, and handing over $1,000 for the recovery of our abandoned gold mini-shopping cart, there’s no doubt that it was a big event for us at SeeWhy! (…)
The shopping cart abandonment rate has increased to 75% in the first 6 months of 2011. The rate, which averaged 71% for 2010, measures the proportion of online shopping carts that are started, and then abandoned.
Normal seasonal trends have the rate decreasing in the first half of the year, declining further over the summer months, then spiking in anticipation of holiday promotions being rolled out.
Once the holiday promotions are widely available, the rate declines again as shoppers make their holiday purchases online in volume.
Four Best Practices Illustrate How to Recover More Revenues from Shopping Cart Abandoners
Shopping cart abandonment is a persistent problem for all ecommerce merchants, yet surprisingly, only 16% of online merchants send shopping cart abandonment emails. This is even more surprising when you look at the amount of revenue these campaigns drive.
New Conversion Academy research shows that best in class shopping cart recovery emails generate $17.90 in revenue per email sent. On average, 20.8% of abandoners come back and buy. And when they do, they spend 55% more on average than purchasers who bought without abandoning. (…)
In Part 1, we looked at how promotions can have a dramatic impact on the revenue that can be recovered with triggered shopping cart abandonment emails. In this blog, we look at the potential pitfalls of using promotions in shopping cart recovery campaigns and the different strategies you can use to avoid these issues.
We’ll take a look at the three broad types of problems you’ll encounter in turn:
Analyzing abandoned shopping cart data from one of our customers last week made me sit up and take notice: Optimizations to their remarketing campaign and the introduction of a promotional discount for the first time caused their recovery rate to jump from 18% to 46%.
Wow. Clearly promotions can make a big impact.
There’s lots of academic research which shows that while promotions have limited affect on long-term sales, they enable marketers to grab market share by incentivizing consumers to stock up on their product at the expense of a competitor’s share. (…)
In 2011, the shopping cart abandonment rate continued its rise, reaching a new all-time high of 72% by the end of the year. In this blog, I’ll try to answer why the shopping cart abandonment rate has risen, despite a focus on conversion optimization by many ecommerce sites. I’ll also explain why I predict that the shopping cart abandonment rate will continue to rise in 2012.
