Good intentions: Buyers using shopping carts as wish lists

A new study by the University of Glasgow and agency Amaze has found that 87% of online shoppers had abandoned a shopping cart in the last 3 months, but that 74% planned to return later to complete the transaction. This behavior reflects a trend to use shopping carts as wish lists, where items can be stored for later purchase.

There were however significant differences by product category, with clothing and computer products more likely to be purchased immediately, while books, movies and music are more likely to be stored in the shopping cart on a wish list.

The trend of storing items in the cart is also paralleled by a more price conscious consumer, hungry for a good deal.

Of course while buyers may say they plan to return later to complete the transaction, it is clear that a much smaller percentage actually do (although the survey unfortunately didn’t look at this). There are many different reasons for storing items in the cart, which account for this discrepancy, including to:

-See how much the purchase would cost in total
-Unsure about the purchase and wanted time to consider
-Compare alternate products
-Look for vouchers and promotion codes online
-Research the purchase on more sites, find independent reviews
-See whether they can find the same item cheaper elsewhere online
-One of the conclusions that you have to inevitably draw from this is that ecommerce teams need to follow up on abandoned shopping carts quickly. There is a limited time period available for you to capture the sale before the $ get spent elsewhere – either for the same product on a different site, or for an alternate purchase, seemingly unrelated.

Yet research from SeeWhy shows that only a tiny percentage of websites do this (2% follow up within an hour), although 90% of those that don’t follow up want to do so.

Additional resources

-Copy of the survey report: Shop ‘till they Drop
-Blog: Why we buy online – a look at online buyer behavior
-On demand web presentation: Real time 1-to-1 email remarketing: a 30 minute best practices overview of real time remarketing techniques
-Tools: SeeWhy’s free Abandonment Tracker service – a service that tracks website abandoners

More on the survey itself

A total of 304 internet shoppers were surveyed online, of which 60% were female. The goal of the study was to look at buyer behavior during the checkout process, and to understand why people abandonment shopping carts prior to checkout.