We’re All Abandoners Now
I’ve just been shopping. Well, sort of. I visited a well-known retailer and had a casual browse around, chucking a few vaguely interesting items into my trolley. After about thirty seconds I got bored and headed over to the checkout. The total wasn’t to my liking so I booted the trolley onto its side and bowled out of there. No-one batted an eyelid.
OK, so I’ve omitted one key fact. I wasn’t in a real shop made of solid stuff like bricks, just an online store. And I hadn’t risked an ASBO by throwing a tantrum in public; I just wanted to see how much their delivery charges were. No big deal. Well, not to consumers like you and me, but to retailers it’s a huge problem and they call it shopping cart abandonment.
Yes, abandonment: a word normally reserved for walking out on children or losing all self control (if it’s in a good way then it’s normally preceded by ‘gay’). Not so long ago shopping cart abandonment could only mean dumping a trolley in a canal or by lock-up garages. But in the virtual world it means not bothering to type your credit card number into a web page, or neglecting to click ‘Submit’ – in fact, it’s any time you add something to your basket but don’t follow through and pay. (Incidentally, I once used a real abandoned shopping trolley to move to a new flat only a hundred yards from my old one; arduous and humiliating but I couldn’t give in once I’d committed to the idea.)
Photo by Mike Warren
Should we feel bad about abandoning our shopping carts? Of course not you cry, why the hell should we? Well, here’s a reason: every half-decent online retailer has an ecommerce manager responsible for the store’s performance. The main measure of their worth as a human being is the shop’s conversion rate – the percentage of visitors who actually buy stuff – so every time a visitor dumps their trolley in a virtual canal, another little bit of them dies inside.
And don’t think they’re not watching you. Modern traffic analysis software can show visitor behaviour in real-time, and send alerts when carts are ditched. In their annual Performance Index report, software company MarketLive estimates typical abandonment rates at over 60 percent, so ecommerce managers spend a lot of time watching shoppers load up their baskets then stroll right out the door, blissfully unaware that their actions are of interest to either man or machine. The virtual shopkeepers must claw at their screens in despair, tears of frustration rolling down their cheeks, as they plead for the return of customers who don’t even know they exist.
So next time you’re nonchalantly lobbing stuff in an online cart, with little intention of making a purchase, spare a thought for the backroom geeks hanging on your every click. If you decide to buy, you might just make their day. But don’t get too carried away. After all, in some dark corner of the ‘net there’s a huge canal, deeper than the abysses of hell, that’s full to overflowing with virtual abandoned shopping trolleys. Throwing yours on top won’t make that much difference.
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