Shoppers less likely to abandon carts when visiting charity websites

Friday, August 7, 2015 - 08:29 by Paul Tissington

People who are thinking of giving to charitable organisations using an online payment service are far less likely to abandon their cart, than those who carry out safe shopping online with standard e-commerce retailers, according to a new report from Ve.

Furthermore, it seems that charities are also much better at dealing with people who do abandon their carts, with follow-up emails sent by these organisations helping to encourage more people to return and complete a transaction, to help out the good cause in question.

Cart abandonment rates for charity sites sit at 62 per cent in the report, while retailers can fall anywhere between 69 and 70 per cent.

The highest rates were registered on sites dealing with education, where people can sign in to create applications for positions of academic study. Here, around 92 per cent of all carts are abandoned, which is to be expected.

Analysts identified a number of reasons that charities do better than retailers in this respect, with the user-friendliness of site interfaces being cited as one of the biggest influencing factors.

It was determined that people who visit charitable sites tend to be much more committed to the idea of making a donation than those who are merely browsing sites which offer safe shopping online.

People visit charity sites and e-commerce sites for different reasons, but it is interesting that, in many cases, the experience of using the former is better than the latter. This all makes a big difference when people are on the fence about parting ways with any of their cash, whether to give to a charity or to purchase something for themselves.

Retailers are regularly criticised over poor site design choices and this should be yet another wakeup call.