As more website visitors become more experienced online, even more visitors will abandon their shopping carts, and online comparison shopping will become ever more commonplace.
A new shopping cart abandonment study by Forrester Research shows that these trends are on the rise. According to the report, website visitors that abandon shopping carts are also 84% more likely to research online to ensure they get the best price.
We already know that highly educated, experienced and wealthy shoppers are more likely to use voucher codes or look for them online. Forrester found that web buyers that abandon shopping carts spend more online than those that don’t. What this tells us is that visitors that abandoned shopping carts are very valuable: higher income customers that are more tech savvy, and use this knowledge to comparison shop and get better deals online.
Forrester noted this trend as follows:
- More than two –thirds of shopping cart abandoners say they like to shop around before making a purchase
- Nearly one half of shopping cart abandoners say that they plan to conduct more online research before purchasing in order to get the best price
The Forrester report also looks at the overall trend in shopping cart abandonment. It reports that for nearly one quarter of online retailers, the shopping cart abandonment rate was higher than in previous years.
This suggests that despite optimization of shopping cart processes, shopping cart abandonment is here to stay. This is in part because the top causes of shopping cart abandonment are not addressed by shopping cart optimization, but because they are behavioural issues: website visitors not yet ready to buy, looking for a better deal, or concerned about the cost of shipping and handling etc. More details about the reasons why website visitors abandon shopping carts can be found here.
