New Index: Listrak Shopping Cart Abandonment
LITITZ, PA-- - Listrak, an email marketing solutions provider for the leading internet retailers, today launched the e-commerce industry's first daily and six month average Shopping Cart Abandonment index, which tracks cart abandonment rates of online shoppers from the company's top internet retail clients. In an effort to help online retailers recoup sales, the index provides a daily abandonment rate with the ability to expand the timeline and identify trends over a period of time. Until now, the e-commerce industry only had access to annual abandonment rates published by Forrester Research, which last year estimated the cost to be $18 billion.
Listrak's new index provides a closer look at fluctuations in shopping cart abandonment and the ability to identify specific moments within a given timeframe. For example, a look at the 2011 holiday season revealed the lowest abandonment rate at 67.66% was on December 16th, "free shipping day" (see chart above, also available here). This was more than 1% lower than Cyber Monday, the second lowest abandonment day at 68.88%."
8 Comments:
I used to shop at a Kroger's that was notoriously short on checkout staff. I developed the habit of filling two carts and abandoning one near the checkouts. It wasn't long before they got the message.
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From the title, I thought that this might be about shopping carts abandoned in parking lots as a protest about the ban on plastic shopping bags in our doofus city.
--Mark (in San Jose, CA)
The LOWEST abandonment rate was 67%? Wow. Lots of people (like me) get to check-out, see the shipping and handling charges and change their minds.
a lot of folks have been mining this data for some time.
some even go so far as to send you an e-mail offering you a deal on the items you had put in your cart, though i think this model fell apart as people learned to game it.
I'm not sure how much value there is to this information, and I certainly don't believe that online retailers lost $18 bn last yeat due to cart abandonment.
Like Michael Hoff I often get to checkout to determine total cost including shipping, and possible tax, while comparison shopping. It's kind of a bug (feature) of the system.
There is no additional cost to either the shopper or the merchant from abandonment, so it's likely to remain a common practice, and the numbers may not mean much.
I would like a definition of cart abandonment. The rate seems high for what I would think it is.
Mark, thanks for your post on our new cart abandonment index. Your insights on the holiday shopping season are very telling. We were surprised that "free shipping day" had a greater impact on abandonment than the long standing on-line shopping day of Cyber Monday. I think between what the data shows and the comments regarding shipping cost aversion from Michael Hoff and Ron H. that we may have touched on a root cause for cart abandonment.
Thanks to all for your comments.
Ross Kramer
Listrak CEO
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