Do you lose people from your shopping cart?

A recent PayPal email newsletter states: "Did you know that about 50% of online shopping carts are abandoned at checkout? (Source: Shop.org/Forrester, 2007) This means a large proportion of customers shopping in your online store never finish their purchases." PayPal is intent on selling their express checkout system, but can I suggest that an equally important reason why so many orders fail at this stage. This is that the seller has missed or given unclear information on their main site as to what freight and packing charges may be. Too often I have had to go into a site's shopping cart to check just what the total payment will be. Then I cancel out even though I may intend to go back and order later. The worst kind of shopping cart is the kind that insists on personal details before it will offer the answer to the really important question: How much is this going to ccost me? I have asked about this at several computer forums and have had confirmed that this is a major reason for dropping out of the shopping cart.

Comments

[Gordon Woolf]

So I've added a comment to my own blog !

I tried to contact PayPal about their newsletter comments -- and failed. So I went to the source and asked the research people at shop.org, and they told me that "64% of retailers surveyed planned to invest this year in how their Web site handles 'Total shipping handling charges calculated before checkout'."

That's a huge proportion -- almost two in every three of the online sellers surveyed.

Their full comment (from Fiona) was:

While we haven't done research with consumers on this question, we did query retailers earlier this year in our State of Retailing Online (SORO) research on a number of related topics. In the Shop.org SORO Merchandising Web Optimization Report, published July 2008, we found that 64% of retailers surveyed planned to invest this year in how their Web site handles "Total shipping handling charges calculated before checkout". Even more planned to invest in the shopping cart page (80%) and checkout process overall (79%).

On a related note, in our eHoliday 2007 study, we asked consumers, "When choosing to make holiday purchases from a given retailer, what is most important to you?" The top responses to the question were: clear product descriptions, value for money, product available to ship immediately, guaranteed on-time delivery, and free returns shipping offer (again followed by numerous other answer options). The press release referencing these findings can be found at http://www.shop.org/c/journal_articles/view_article_content?groupId=1articleId=381version=1.0.