Consumers Still Walking Away From Shopping Carts?

Although there have been recent and continuous advancements in website design for the last five years and by all accounts consumers are more and more comfortable with the online shopping experience, they still continue to walk away in droves from what’s often the final aspect of the purchase matrix—the shopping cart.

Marketers have been trying to fix the problem for as long as consumers have been having problems with this electronic closer. Efforts by those charged with getting that final trigger pulled have included tweaking the buttons by changing the color and size and even down-scaling the amount of data required from consumers. All to little or no avail.

Now there’s a new focus that says these marketers might be looking in the wrong places. A recent report at GetElastic.com found the real reasons people were unwilling to use the shopping cart had little to do with the process. In fact the research showed that:

• Almost half at 44% said the reason they wouldn’t commit had nothing to do with the cart at all but rather the simple fact that handling and shipping costs were too high.
• Another 27% wanted to make price comparisons.

Although there were a few other reasons that were included in the research, the trend is something all internet based business needs to be aware of and that’s simply the old adage about competition driving price is magnified a thousand times over when consumers can shop on the Internet and through cyberspace with the greatest of ease. No matter what your goods or services are, you need to be sure you’ve priced the product in a competitive manner with technology in mind. If you don’t, all the technology, alluring buttons and simplified processes won’t be able to help you close the deal.