Chop Shopping Cart Abandonment

More than 80% of online shopping carts end up abandoned, defined as the consumer placing one or more items into the cart, then ending up not buying anything in the cart. That startling statistic motivated researchers at University of Richmond, Clemson University, University of Southampton, and Shenzhen University to identify tips for lowering the cart abandonment rate.
     The researchers acknowledge the limitations of their project. They depended on only analyses of shoppers’ clickstream data, which leaves out the influences of search engine advertising and product reviews on shopping cart abandonment, for example. Still, that clickstream data was for more than 179,000 shoppers, with the number of shopping sessions ranging from 1 to 20 for each customer. Another limitation is that all the clicks analyzed were for one ecommerce retailer. But it was a multinational retailer which sold a range of products.
     Here are some of those tips, along with cautions: 

• Encourage smartphone shopping, especially when featuring clearance items or other sorts of deep discounts. Shopping cart abandonment rates were lower with smartphone shopping than when other devices were used. 
• Make item reviews easy to access, read, and navigate. Keep the reviews brief. Excessive detail or too many reviews results in deferring the choices and so abandoning the cart. 
• Build purchase certainty for items placed in the cart by maintaining and publicizing liberal return policies, including free return shipping. 
• When a customer removes an item from the cart, suggest an alternative to them. 
• When a consumer leaves an item in the cart and exits the shopping site, send a follow-up message encouraging them to complete the purchase. However, sending the message immediately can spook the shopper. Wait a day or two.

     Shopping cart abandonment can become an issue in physical store selling, too, especially with self-checkout kiosks. Researchers at Oregon State University and Rutgers University found that an underappreciated cause of this is mistrust in the performance of the device. The researchers then identified a simple way to increase the trust: Give sounds of confirmation as the transaction progresses. Silence generates annoying uncertainty, while a brief series of tones tells the customer that the device is carrying out their wishes. This relaxes the customer’s concerns about tabulation accuracy and security of payment information. In the studies, the use of confirmation tones increased purchase intentions.

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