You are the online shopper, you see something you like and pop it in your basket. Just at that moment your partner, child or pet distracts you, you close the browser tab thinking “I’ll buy it another time”. Cart: abandoned.
On that basis you might not be surprised to hear the majority of online shoppers that add something to their cart don’t complete their purchase.
Just in case you were worried about your rates, cart abandonment tends to be over 65% — the Baynard Institute has calculated an average across multiple studies of 68.63%.
Barilliance—a supplier of tech solutions in this space—puts rates at a global average of 71.39% with mobile devices being the highest at nearly 80%
Cloud.IQ discovered most people abandon carts between 8-9pm, mostly on a Thursday.
Ecommerce data analysts might split out abandonment rates to include:
- Site abandonment rate – the percentage of site visitors that haven’t added anything to their cart.
- Cart abandonment rate – the percentage of shoppers who have added one or more items to their cart but not proceeded to checkout.
- Checkout abandonment rate – the percentage of shoppers that have begun, but not completed, the checkout process
Why do shoppers abandon their carts?
Reasons for a high cart abandonment rate include:
- A poorly designed checkout
- Overlong forms to complete
- Unexpectedly delivery costs or additional fees
- Web page redirects to external websites they might not trust.
Based on a Worldpay survey, Statista presents various reasons for shoppers not completing transactions, ranging from the fixable site bugs and UI problems through to unknowable - the visitor was just browsing. 57% of people left because they were presented with unexpected costs.