Top 10 Reasons Why Customers Abandon Their Shopping Carts

May 13, 2008

I wrote a brief article about Multi-page checkouts versus Single or “One Page” checkouts the other day and I wanted to follow-up with some reasons that people such as the customers and potential customers on your websites right now abandon their shopping carts. It is probably the biggest problem faced by anyone running an e-commerce based company today. So what factors affect people from spending on your web site? Well…

  1. Cost of shipping too high and not shown until checkout
  2. Changed mind and discarded cart contents
  3. Comparison shopping or browsing
  4. Total cost of items is too high
  5. Saving items for later purchase
  6. Checkout process is too long
  7. Out of stock products at checkout time
  8. Checkout requires too much personal information
  9. Poor site navigation and long download times
  10. Lack of sufficient product or contact information

Source: SurveyPro

As you can see “Time is Money” as I stated in my original article and overall success in e-commerce weighs heavily on the cost of purchasing and the time in which is takes to do it. Just something to think about if you run an ecommerce business

Luc

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Posted by Lucas | Filed Under General, Site Optimization, Trend Analysis, Web Development, Website Usability 

Comments

3 Responses to “Top 10 Reasons Why Customers Abandon Their Shopping Carts”

  1. Edward Lansink on May 13th, 2008 11:20 pm

    I’m surprised “Technical faults” or something along those lines isn’t in that list. I’m not talking about pages not loading, more like:
    - database errors
    - unresponsive submit buttons
    - badly designed forms that warn you about errors with information entered on a separate page, forcing you to hit the back button and often meaning you have to start filling in the form from scratch

    Also: I wonder what the abandonment rate is for checkout processes that require email validation for registration.

  2. Lucas on May 15th, 2008 9:26 am

    Hello Ed,

    “Technical faults” is a little to general and this survey had more to do with that affect customers purchasing. Naturally this is something that would affect shopping cart abandonment and perhaps a study on the technical aspects that affect people and cause them to leave the shopping cart is something that would help.

    As for how the shopping cart abandonment rate is affected by having the register during the checkout process i believe this was covered in the survey. You make some good points ed! Talk soon

    Luc

  3. Shopping Cart Software on June 21st, 2008 1:13 pm

    Checkout process is too long / Cost of shipping too high and not shown until checkout are the worst! Show that the company does not want my biz.

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