The Key to Negating Shopping Cart Abandonment

Derek Schou
by Derek Schou 24 Nov, 2014

The holiday season has arrived and in order for merchants to maximize their profits they must understand consumer shopping tendencies.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), a A/B website testing solution, has announced the release of a new study that examines on the state of the VWO ecommerce Survey 2014: Trends and Insights to Find and Convert Buyers."

The study polled more than 1,000 consumers and focuses on the top motivations and deterrents when shopping online. Among the key findings from the study was the importance of retargeting to shoppers in order to complete transactions. In fact, 54 percent of shoppers said they would purchase products left in their cart if they receive an offer with a discounted price. Perhaps even more interestingly, 72 percent of millennials (age 25-34) that were polled stated they would purchase an item that was left in their cart if they received another discounted offer.


The study also found that the top three reasons for online shopping cart abandonment were unexpected shipping costs (28 percent), the requirement to create a new user account (23 percent) and that consumers were only conducting research instead of looking to purchase (16 percent).

"Online shoppers are diverse and constantly changing," said Paras Chopra, CEO and founder, VWO. "Our intention with the report was to enable brands to better understand how people are spending money online, as well as the factors that affect their purchase behavior. In the highly competitive ecommerce marketplace, even a slight marketing misstep can be costly. When armed with consumer intelligence, marketers can insure that they're optimizing their websites and winning the conversion game."