Shopping Cart Crimes

In the case of the abandoned shopping cart vs. mankind, we all plead guilty.

Noran El-Shinnawy is a marketing analyst at iPerceptions and can be reached at nelshinnawy@iperceptions.com or Twitter: @noranshinnawy

We’ve all done it before, both on and offline. We’ve all left her cold and lonely in the middle of an aisle, or simply quit in the middle of an online transaction. Shame on us? Well… not really.

As it turns out, online and offline shopping cart abandonment occur for pretty much the same reasons- long checkout processes, obscure prices, and insufficient information to name a few. In today’s fast paced world of your boss pinging your BlackBerry while tying your shoe laces without spilling your latté, no one sticks around long enough to get around these obstacles. Studies have shown that the average attention span of an Internet user is about 8 seconds. This means squirrels are more likely to stick around your website long enough to actually make a purchase.

There are so many reasons why we fill up online shopping carts without ever having the intention to purchase in the first place. For most shopping sites, this is actually the only way to add up prices of items, check shipping costs and taxes, or simply compile everything you like in one place. Once you’ve gathered whatever information you were looking for, that’s when you commit your abandonment crime. You might get that thrill of being a fugitive and think that the Internet police are after you. But all that really does is leaves analysts like me wondering.

For e-commerce websites, it has never been more important to measure 2 very important metrics- purpose of visit and task completion. A simple online survey software can help you answer questions about why visitors come to your website and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. These answers will not only provide you with actionable insight (yes, the most overused term in our industry), but will also help you pinpoint areas that may require change or improvement. Putting it in context, it might actually be okay to have a high abandonment rate if your visitors never intended to make a purchase.

Take 4Qsurvey.com as an example. (Did you just have a flashback of one of Avinash’s presentations? Sorry to disappoint you, but the next few lines will not contain politically incorrect words). Our primary goal for the website is user account sign-up. As a free tool, this is obviously not transactional, but just as well. According to Google Analytics, our conversion rate has fluctuated between 3% and 4%, which would appear as though between 96% and 97% of visitors are “abandoning.” (tip of the day: do NOT go see your boss with these numbers).

As terrible as they may appear, these numbers mean nothing unless I put them in context. I had to dig into my survey results to find out that 15% of visitors are onsite with the intention of creating an account, and that everyone else is “pre-transactional.” The task completion rate for those visitors intending to create an account averages out to about 84%. This means that the real abandonment figure stands at only 16% not 96%. NOW let’s go see your boss.

It’s starting to seem that looking at conversion as the only measure of success is a thing of the past. Be sure to put things in context and understand the real intent of your website visitors and their task completion rates. Looks like we marketers should stop obsessing about completed transactions and start shifting their focus to pre (and post) -transactional behavior…

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