Online cart abandonment habits assessed

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - 10:52 by Simon Crisp

Although retailers are constantly fighting to try and prevent consumers from giving up half way through a bout of safe shopping online, millions of people still add items to their virtual basket and then leave the site before completing the purchase.

Now a new report from Connexity has indicated that companies need not be so concerned by cart abandonment rates, since 53 per cent of the shoppers studied were found to return to finish transactions at a later date.

Almost a third of people who have dabbled with cart abandonment were revealed to have ducked out during the checkout process, suggesting that this remains a key obstacle which retailers need to streamline in order to improve sales.

Fifteen per cent said that their reason for pausing and returning later was that they were eager to work out whether or not the products they were looking to buy would meet their requirements. A similar proportion chose to abandon carts to go in search of voucher codes to cut the cost of safe shopping online.

Just over a tenth reported that they stopped shopping on sites because they found that the items they requested were not in stock at that time.

Price was the biggest concern amongst millennials, with a quarter of this age group choosing to abandon carts because they felt items were too expensive. Close to a fifth of the baby boomers questioned were more concerned about the quality of the products on offer.

For retailers, it seems that most actual online purchases are made during working hours, suggesting that outside of the 9am to 5pm window is the point at which casual browsing occurs and cart abandonment rates are likely to remain high, no matter what efforts are made by companies to curb them.