eCommerce Analytics

Looking a report of abandoned shopping carts can be frustrating. All those carts stocked full of high margin items just waiting to be checked out. But the shopper bailed just before pulling the trigger. Was it something you said?

There two recent studies that examined reasons online shoppers fail to purchase after adding items to their carts. CheetahMail published statistics as part of a whitepaper in January 2010 as did Forrester in late 2009 (link to summary blog post). Both largely agree with each other. Let’s combine them and see what they tell us:

Biggest Reasons Shoppers Abandon Carts

(40-60% respondents citing as important)

• Didn’t want to pay shipping costs/High shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase was more than expected (read: tax + S&H)
• Was doing research/wanted to compare price on other sites

Less Important Reasons

(10-30% respondents citing as important)

• Wanted to look for coupon
• Wanted to buy offline instead
• Checkout was too complicated
• Security concerns

No Silver Bullet Here

While it’s tempting to think that a streamlined checkout process can make big improvements in cart abandonment rates the data doesn’t seem to bear that out. Instead, the biggest source of control we have in getting a customer to complete a purchase is letting them know as early in the process as possible what the total price after tax and shipping and handling will be.

But won’t this just shift abandonment from the cart to an earlier point in the process when the full tax + S&H total is displayed? Unfortunately, it probably will. So we need to look at other ways to address the abandonment problem.

Remarketing to the Rescue?

Let’s take a look at how to do email remarketing — the process of sending follow-up emails to customers who left the site with a full cart. Remarketing produces surprisingly good conversion rates and can be a valuable tool in the fight against cart abandonment.

Ready to get started? Here’s a PHP email remarketing script to jump start your efforts.