A Scary Statistic – Abandoned Shopping Carts

In an effort to keep you informed on my entrepreneurial endeavors, and so that you can learn from both my success and shortcomings, I want to give you an update on the $5,555 giveaway on sandshack.com.

As I’ve mentioned before, online retail sales make up a small fraction of Sand Shack’s business, however, due to our recent generosity, we have seen a surge in orders made online over the last week.  Although we are giving away most things for free we have still been able to make enough to pay for what we are giving away.  So the way I see it is that we are getting thousands of new visitors to our site and getting a lot of new customers for free!

However, today I noticed a very scary statistic.  47.9% of shopping carts started on sandshack.com are eventually abandoned without an order being placed. Almost half of all shoppers serious enough to place a Sand Shack product in a shopping cart leave our site without following through with the purchase! That’s horrible!

The abandoned shopping cart statistic gives you insight into how easy your payment process is for your customers to use. Obviously ours has left many confused. Below is a screen shot of this statistic.

So what is wrong with our site? Today I got my answer.  A customer emailed me when she realized that she still had to fill out her billing information even though the gift card code she was using made it so the bill was $0.  The way the shopping cart software for sandshack.com works is that it won’t process an order without accurate billing information.  When people are prompted to fill out their credit card information to purchase an item that they will get for free, many customers are rightfully scared away.

Even though their credit card will not be charged and the information will not be stored it is still unsettling to fill out this information when nothing is owed, especially when it is not clear whether or not they will be charged.  Also, they can opt to use paypal, however, paypal requires a payment of at least $0.01, so the customer has to be savvy enough to pay $0.01 using paypal. Confusing!

I am currently working with my web guy to fix this problem, but in the meantime I wanted to use this statistic and subsequent revelation as a lesson for all of you that have or are thinking of having an online store.  If the payment process is at all confusing you will lose a lot of customers, so work hard on making sure your website is easy to use and it is easy for your customers to pay you.