High cart abandonment rate found when consumers book holidays online

Thursday, January 15, 2015 - 09:42 by Sarah Collinson

A new report from SaleCycle has found that 81 per cent of people who are using sites that offer safe shopping online to book their next holiday or arrange travel services, choose to abandon their booking.

Cart abandonment is common across the e-commerce sector, but this particular study looked into precisely why people who give up on a purchase before completing it choose to do so.

39 per cent of those questioned said that they were still in the process of researching potential travel options and abandoned their e-commerce carts because they were just browsing.

37 per cent said that they were keen to compare prices across multiple retailers, meaning that they did not want to commit to the first site they visited, for fear that they would be paying over the odds for their travel.

A fifth said that they did not commit to a sale via safe shopping online because they needed to find out about the arrangements of the other people with whom they were planning to travel.

Roughly a ten via safe shopping online because the process of going through the checkout took too long, or was overly complicated.

A similar proportion said that technical faults had got in the way of their order being processed, while just seven per cent cited problems with payment being the thing that drove them away from a site.

A little over half of those questioned said that receiving the price of their travel was the point at which they felt compelled to abandon the shopping process, so in a way, the best thing that retailers can do is offer customers compelling and affordable packages.