Abandonment rate

In marketing, abandonment rate is a term associated with the use of virtual shopping carts. Also known as "shopping cart abandonment". Although shoppers in brick and mortar stores rarely abandon their carts, abandonment of virtual shopping carts is quite common. Marketers can count how many of the shopping carts used in a specified period result in completed sales versus how many are abandoned. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or to the number of completed transactions.

Around 10 sources of information are used before making a decision when buying online (e.g. webshops, review websites, social networks, and the like). In this process the shopper compares at least 5 different websites for the product, and spends up to 20 hours researching. This means that shopping online is not as easy as some predicted 20 years ago.

From both business and scientific perspectives, researchers and practitioners have investigated the problem of online shopping abandonment, trying to understand and address the causes of such low conversion rates. They mostly agree that the biggest problems, for online cart abandonment were: lack of transparency, unclear transaction and delivery costs, lack of trust in the online seller, and poor website functioning or complicated processes.