Interpreting abandoned shopping carts
Much has been written and said about abandon-rates in online shopping, and there is little doubt a well-designed user experience can significantly improve cart completions (and therefore sales). However, to make sense of hard figures it is important to delve a bit deeper and look at the psychology of online customer interaction.
In the scenario of one-on-one sales, a customer who abandons a purchase after displaying a tangible interest in a product can rightly be described as a failure of the sales process. If the customer was ready to buy, how come they were allowed to suddenly change their mind? Surely a good customer experience backed up by a convincing sales assistant should result in money in the cash register?
The e-commerce sales process is not as simple as conventional sales knowledge would dictate. Online shopping is notoriously commitment-free, allowing anonymous browsing and comparison of products. This has two significant consequences, which are often overlooked when analysing e-commerce metrics and whilst arguing about how to improve conversion rates.
Firstly, customers use shopping carts as a book-marking device. Whether serious about buying or not, they are likely to use the cart as a way of keeping track of the products they are interested in. After all, what other options are there, especially when many sites are badly designed and don’t allow browser bookmarking of individual products? If no one is watching you, why not throw a few items in your cart, then review later and narrow down your options?
More importantly, and perhaps more neglected, is the idea of customers using shopping sites as a method for testing how serious they are about a purchase. Just because they are interested in buying something does not mean they will buy it. Most of us want things that we cannot or should not buy. The product in question may be one we feel slightly guilty about buying, and adding it to the cart is a ruthlessly efficient way of deciding if we are really serious or just ‘window shopping’. If customers abandon a purchase at the last minute, it may simply mean they were testing themselves, and the ‘Check out’ or ‘Pay’ buttons provided a much-needed reality check. This behaviour is different to in-store customer interaction, because there is no sales assistant involved, and therefore no sense of guilt.
Analysing e-commerce data is vital to online businesses, and doing so with a fundamental understanding of the customer and online behaviour even more important. The ability to analyse the value, product type and customer data involved in abandoned purchases becomes vital. But the realisation that e-commerce plays by different rules to traditional commerce may be even more enlightening.