The Myth of the Abandoned Shopping Cart

The shopping cart metaphor has become almost universal in ecommerce. A site user checks out products, then clicks on some sort of "buy this" link and goes on (hopefully) to select other products, adds them to his or her virtual cart, and finally goes through a checkout process at the end where he or she types in a shipping address and, at least for most consumer-level online purchases, credit card information. A common complaint, one about which many magazine and online articles have been written, is that ecommerce site users tend to abandon shopping carts at a frightful rate, generally estimated at between 60% and 80% by industry experts.

The reason for all those abandoned shopping carts is simple: The only way a customer can get a total price for a purchase, including shipping, from the vast majority of ecommerce sites is to make all of his or her product selections and go through the entire checkout procedure, right up to the point of typing in credit card information or clicking on a "finalize this purchase" button of some sort. Shipping charges can vary wildly from merchant to merchant, and on some products they are a large enough percentage of the total price that they can significantly influence a potential customer's buy/don't buy decision process. If a smart customer wants to check the total cost of a group of items, including shipping, from three different online merchants, by definition he or she is going to abandon two-thirds of the shopping carts used while choosing a vendor.

One thing to do about abandoned shopping carts is to ignore them. They aren't real shopping carts left in a real store's aisles where they inconvenience other shoppers, just digital fictions not worth a great deal of anguish. Another possibility is to make it easy for customers to save their shopping data on their own computers so they can look at the products they were thinking of purchasing at their leisure, then come back later and take up where they left off with a minimum of fuss. This feature would take a little thought, and a bit of programming, but would not be hard to implement.

A third alternative would be to abandon the shopping cart metaphor altogether. Surely someone as bright as you can come up with an interesting alternative, one that is as easily understood but not as tied to a physical allegory.