Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Consumers who abandon shopping carts on e-commerce sites do so mainly because the sites impose costly shipping and handling costs or lengthy shipment times. This is one part of the findings of a survey conducted last month by NetIQ Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based vendor of web-analytics tools. The company announced the results this week. In the survey, 35% of respondents said they walked away from pending Internet transactions because of shipping costs or lack of timeliness in shipping. Another 30% dropped their orders because Web sites demanded too much information at time of purchase. These reasons were followed by complaints of too little product information (17%). Yet another 14% of those surveyed said they simply decided during the transaction to buy the product from a physical store instead. Some 632 adults across the country responded to the survey by phone. The cost to Web merchants of abandoned transactions is mounting. NetIQ cites figures from Datamonitor showing that losses from aborted purchases may reach $63 billion in 2004, bringing the total loss since 1999 to $173 billion. Other data, from research firm eMarketer, shows that 52% of online transactions are never consummated as a result of consumers walking away. At the same time, respondents to the NetIQ survey cited security (52%) and attractive prices (55%) as the two biggest reasons for returning to sites.
