E-commerce shopping cart abandonment question!

[BryanCroft]

I would like to know, in your personal experience what is the industry standard for shopping cart abandonment? Does it depend on the industry? Obviously I am not looking for the magic number because there is always room for testing and improvements. However, I do want to know what is the comfortable number that you can live with? Is it 50%, 60%?, 70%?

Thank you in advance for your help.

[CPLDistribution]

Hi Bryan

Really interesting and I'm keen to hear other people's experiences.

I can't comment off the top of my head on shopping cart abandonment rates but for checkout abandonment rates I would be expecting a consumer website with a good checkout process to convert more than 50% of users once they have clicked a 'checkout' button. With a poor checkout process I would expect this to go down to about 30%.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Bryan,

This is similar to the good, great, industry standard bounce rate questions for ecommerce.

It depends on your products, promotions, cart friendliness, software performance etc.

Like bounce rate, your cart abandonment rate will develop a track record over time and once your site performs consistently, you'll now what is good and when there is a problem.

As a parent, you know when those two great looking kids of yours are not acting healthy. Similarly, you'll know when your site, cart etc. is not acting healthy either.

I'm sure our cart abandonment rate is higher than average because of the large volume of heavy products we sell on our site. Once the customer sees the shipping cost at checkout, they balk and bounce.

Our cart provider (Volusion) has been having functionality issues of all kinds since late February. That's a whole 'nother can of worms but suffice to say it has had a significant impact on cart abandonment.