Yahoo Finance Retailers miss out on £18 billion in online sales as shoppers abandon items at virtual checkout
Two in five shoppers abandon online purchases at the virtual checkout costing retailers an estimated £18bn a year in lost sales.
UK shoppers each abandon an online basket worth an average of £29.37 every month, with many leaving before paying as they feel delivery charges are too high and the payment process too slow.
Many others admit they have, in effect, been window shopping and had little intention to buy in the first place.
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More than one in ten (12%) put items in an online basket to hold on to them so they don’t sell out, research by Barclaycard shows.
Barclaycard said many retailers are also missing the data or insights they need to tackle the online conversion challenge which it dubbed a “surf and turf” trend.
Clare Bailey, an independent retail expert, said: “It is so important that retailers not only invest in marketing to drive footfall to their websites, but also in their payment process to ensure that the online shopping experience is as seamless and hassle-free as possible.
“In the same way that consumers can lose interest in a purchase when buying in-store due to long queues, they are also put off by confusing and long check-out processes online.
“As such, retailers don’t want to waste their efforts in helping customers get items into the basket only to fall at the final hurdle when customers drop out because of problems at the check-out.”
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Brits are most likely to have abandoned women’s clothing (29%), men’s clothing (26%) and entertainment items (26%). Shoppers aged 25-34 were identified as the most indecisive online.
The items most frequently ‘window shopped and dropped’ online are:
Women’s knitwear
Leather goods, such as wallets
Women’s lingerie & hosiery
Headphones
Watches
Women’s sportswear
Women’s skirts
Books
Men’s trousers/jeans
Women’s tops & shirts
Barclaycard’s research revealed that six in ten retailers were unaware of the average buyer drop-out rate on their website and just one in four analyse the browsing behaviour of shoppers who abandon their baskets.
Almost half are also unable to pinpoint lost sales by gender and four in ten by age group.
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George Allardice, head of strategy with Barclaycard, said shoppers leaving online sites without buying anything was a perennial problem.
He added: “There are many ways retailers can convert online interest into sales – whether this is reminder emails about items left in online baskets, reducing the steps required to check out online, or securely storing card details so shoppers don’t need to re-enter them every time they visit a site.
“These actions will be most effective if they are based on insights about shopper behaviour, but as our research shows, there’s currently a knowledge gap that could be holding businesses back.”
