Everyone Abandons - Eventually: Understanding the Online Shopping Experience

Abstract

Many e-stores use conversion rates, ie. how many people convert shopping baskets to actualpurchases as a primary indicator of success. A low conversion rate is used as a reason for spending moretime and effort on improving the usability of the site, assuming thatthe fault must be with the usability of the website.There is some question, however, about whether this focusis justified. We argue here that the online shopping experience has adistinct nature of its own, having different characteristics andencouraging different behaviours. We therefore carried out a study in order tounderstand e-shopper behaviours - specifically their usage ofthe electronic shopping basket and wish list. We used an online survey to ask anumber of questions calculated to explore this usage. We report hereon our findings.We found that eventually, along with becoming more mature in the usageof online ecommerce, every e-shopper will abandon the shoppingbasket. Hence abandonment rates should not be used as a successindicator and a low conversion rate does not indicate that a site'susabiity is poor. We also identified three categories of e-shopper, thevague, the cost conscious and the window shoppers. The first group had the strongest intention to purchase and were the least likely toabandon their shopping baskets with the other two groups being morelikely to abandon.Finally there werealso two distinct types of wish list user: the cleaners and thehoarders. The former were cost conscious and appeared to use the wishlist to monitor prices. The hoarders tended to have used e-commercefor longer and used the wish list to keep track of items they mightwell like to purchase in the future.