The Ins and Outs of the Abandoned Cart

Cool graphic. It's definitely worth studying, but I disagree with counting the value of abandoned carts as "lost" revenue.

Instead I think this is a case of the online shopping cart being viewed too much like its real-world equivalent. Adding items to a cart online may be closer to bookmarking than to purchasing (another reason is to reveal the cost of items with hidden pricing, as is practiced on Amazon).

Some retailers require you to start the checkout process find how how much shipping (and possibly tax) will cost. When I am shopping around for something, I'll often go partway through the checkout process just to get a cost I can compare with other retailers.

Even worse, some retailers (occasionally Amazon) require you to add something to your cart to see the sale price, which presumably they aren't allowed to "advertise."

I'd bet that very few of these lost sales are really lost sales. Either some other retailer got the customer's business or the customer decided not to purchase from anywhere.

Maybe if you'd show me shipping charges when I select the item this would be less of a problem. Although odds are that just means I won't even add the item to my cart.

I've heard of people filling physical carts with (non-perishable) goods and abandoning them in the store to protest against a supermarket chain. This makes me wonder whether a similar online tactic might be effective.

Totally agree with the past comments. This graphic exaggerates the impact of abandoned carts with misleading conclusions.

In the end, adding items to a cart is no different than viewing an item's page (imagine the billions lost through "abandoned" page views!).

That said, it's still helpful. Permuto highlights the reasons behind cart abandonment. It's essentially a list stuff retailers should properly convey to their customers way before check out.

This is tangentially related, but when I lived in Palo Alto I'd walk past the Permuto ("The Shopper Connect Network") offices every day (the corner of College Ave and Staunton Ct) and always wondered what they did, exactly.

Some sort of B2B e-commerce and analytics company?

agree with comments here that this is not real lost revenue - its mostly online window shopping - however on your ecommerce retail site we put flat rate shipping cost on the product page to entice people to buy and give them that crucial info upfront. also there is a typo on the infographic - it says US population is 309.5 Billion : )