Shopping cart abandonment benchmarks

In this article I review some choice statistics about shopping cart abandonment rates from a talk by Anne Holland of MakretingSherpa, Etail Speech Take II: Three Ways to Lower Shopping Cart Abandons Based on MarketingSherpa Research.

Anne's talk is data from the  Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, January 2007 – a survey with 1,923 respondents. Across all those respondents, average shopping cart abandonment rates were 52.1% in 2006 (i.e. 52.1% of customers who entered the shopping cart system never made it to the checkout). This was an improvement on 59.8% in 2005. As usual, the average of these things is not much of a benchmark in itself - the results for 2006 fell into a normal curve where the high end of the normal range was 80% abandoned carts and the low end was 12.5%. This presumably reflects the fact that we are not always in the industry of "businesses who sell things using the Internet"  - sometimes we are, but there are a lot of concerns specific to a particular sector: buying a car or a computer from a website may not be the same thing as buying a book or CD. To give a practical example, if you are concerned with a site that has a 50% abandonment rate, you don't necessarily know whether you are doing well against your competitors with their 80% rate, or are a real slouch against their 12% rate.

The survey respondents were asked what new improvements they were trying and what worked best. A top tactic for big sites was to introduce a "bill me later" feature - 17% of big ecommerce sites had done this in 2006. MarketingSherpa have a case study with Newegg which in various "bill me later" features were taken up by 10% of customers. But these customers were the big spenders, with much bigger shopping carts than average.

The next way to improve was (once again, as in the 2006 report) by testing the shopping cart. Once again, this was the thing that most respondents reported as being most effective to get a return on ROI. Apparently small or subtle changes, such as changes to the text on buttons could turn out to be important. Coming second and third (again as in 2005) were improving internal search, and improving site copy. So these look like good areas to review in a shopping cart improvement project.

Tactic number 3 was to send email(s) to customers who had abandoned carts (of course you can only do this if you have their email addresses and the relevant permission to use it). 73% of respondents said this was an effective   improvement. A case study with Limoges Jewelry showed that the technique could be effective even if the emails were a simple generic one (rather than a customized text): Limoges found this got a 28.77% conversion  (though this was only reached after a few months)

Comments

[Japanese words]

Carts have improved int eh last couple of years, but I am always surprised at some sites where I have to search just to check out.

[dissertation]

Blogs are so interactive where we get lots of informative on any topics nice job keep it up !!

[Listrak]

Hi!

To follow up on your notion of DON'T INTERROGATE, we've seen this concept work beautifully. So much so that we recommend our clients only ask for one piece of information to begin the checkout process.... email.

By doing so, you can capture the email address in real-time. If the shopper abandons their cart you can use this email to remarket their cart and motivate them to complete their purchase. Even better, you can see what step they abandoned and use that information to make their shopping cart more appealing.

For example, if the shopper abandons at the shipping step, perhaps a free or discounted shipper offer will turn them? Or perhaps they leave at the confirmation page (sooo close!) If so, a $$$ or %%% off could put them over the edge.

We have a video that explains the process in more detail and I'd appreciate your thoughts on the concept in general.

http://www.listrak.com/Solutions/Shopping-Cart-Abandonment.aspx

[Carl]

Fab post, I think the quality of the shopping cart software you use makes a big difference to the front end of your site, particularly with issues like cart abandonment. If the software you're using not only allows you to, but also helps you to create an extremely user friendly checkout process, the chances of cart abandonment are slim.