When Sylvan Goldman invented the original shopping cart in 1937, he had to hire models to demonstrate exactly how to use the new contraption. Customers at his Oklahoma City stores were accustomed to shopping with heavy metal baskets and didn't know what to make of the convenient wheeled carts.
Now, more than 60 years later, a new kind of cartâ€"designed for e-commerce sitesâ€"also faces obstacles. It's not that customers aren't eagerly filling up their online baskets. On the contrary. But for some reason they aren't making it to the checkout line.
Depending on which survey you choose, customers abandon online shopping carts at a rate of between 25 percent and 77 percent. According to a survey by The Yankee Group, more than 75 percent of online shoppers have abandoned a shopping cart at least once. "I think it's really indicative of consumer expectations not being met," says Christine Loeber, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group. "Now that consumers have been online for a while the tolerance level isn't there. They expect online shopping to be more convenient than offline shopping. If not, why bother?"
Shoppers abandon their online carts for many reasonsâ€"in recent usability tests, the Ziff Davis Smart Business Labs found that turn-offs include poor site navigation, hard-to-find shopping carts, and time-consuming checkouts. The grim statistics, coupled with the demise of many high-profile e-tailers last year, make for challenging times in electronic commerce. Fewer sites may mean less competition, but with so many wary consumers, it's critical that your site provide a shopping experience as close to flawless as possible. "The key is to understand who your customers are and make sure you listen to what they want and need," says Loeber, "and to make those changes to ensure a simple and efficient online shopping experience."
To get your site on the right pathâ€"and to clear your virtual aisles of abandoned cartsâ€"we've assembled a guide to the mission-critical parts of an e-commerce site. Following these tips may mean the difference between a successful shopping experience for your customers and a missed sales opportunity for your company. We'll show you where to make the most radical changes to get customers through your site, into the checkout line, and to that still-rare territory of closing the deal.
You have missed the most important point. Users abandon shopping trolleys - because they can! It's no problem. There's no comeback. They aren't real trolleys. No one gets hurt.
Why consider it as a problem? It's no different from window shopping. More people can do it and more will walk away because they had no real intention of buying in the first place.
You have lots of good advice about how to encourage potentiall buyers to purchase, all of it valid. But where's the problem? In a different paradigm, people will behave differently. Just because they put stuff in an internet shopping cart, ther is no implication that they ever intended to buy. Many will be just testing the system to see what happens, to try to understand how it works.
It may be that with the most perfect system, most visitors will never buy, so expending effort to improve the percentage is not cost effective.
My point is, understand the motivation of users and fix problems that really exist.