Shopping Cart Abandonment

Recent Survey Gives Online Hospitality Merchants Fifteen Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

Market researchers say the rate at which Web consumers abandon their online shopping carts (or reservation process) before making purchases online runs between 25 percent (Andersen Consulting) on the low end and 78 percent (Bizrate.com) on the high end. A recent survey by Global Millennia Marketing, an Internet e-Business developer, offers valuable insight into understanding shopping cart or reservation process abandonment.

Global Millennia Marketing conducted a number of survey's via its various monthly clients newsletters and was used as part of the design study for development of IMS Voyager^© our hospitality, merchandising and online reservation system. The results detail the experiences of 833 subscribers who responded as to how they used shopping carts or made reservations on a wide variety of hospitality & ecommerce sites.

According to the survey, the top 15 reasons for shopping cart abandonment, and the percentage of subscribers citing each as a reason, include:

1. Cost of Shipping too high and not shown until checkout (69%)
2. Changed mind and discarded cart contents (61%)
3. Comparison shopping or browsing (57%)
4. Total cost of items is too high (49%)
5. Saving items for later purchase (47%)
6. Checkout process is too long (44%)
7. Out of stock products/rooms at checkout time (39%)
8. Checkout requires too much personal information (35%)
9. Poor site navigation and long download times (31%)
10. Lack of sufficient product or contact information (31%)
11. Checkout process is confusing (27%)
12. Site requires registration before purchase (23%)
13. Site unclear on delivery times (17%)
14. No order tracking options (16%)
15. No gift certificates (11%)

"It's unfortunate that Web hoteliers, tour operators and retailers are losing customers due to issues that can be resolved by understanding retailing and merchandising principles." said John Shenton, president of IMS.

"These fundamental issues can have a significant impact on the underlying business. It can be clearly seen that shopping-cart-abandonment would drop dramatically with a well designed e-commerce solution, resulting in significant increases in revenue and bottom line profit."- John Shenton - April, 2002