Website Shopping Carts
 

You know when you use sites like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, or virtually any site that sells something, they use a system known as a 'shopping cart'. You know, "add to shopping cart"? You usually have to 'go to checkout' to complete your purchase.

Well, this graphic is about all those people who never get to the 'checkout', and bail before completing the transaction. Lotsa money 'lost'.

(I don't quite understand the percentages regarding "Why People Abandon Cart Items", but, here it is.)

I do this to see what the S & H charges will be.
Often they are not worth the cost of the item, or the time for delivery.
I want mine now !

I find even internet shopping carts always have a dodgy wheel and will never go straight. I hate that.

What about those of use that enjoy a little retail therapy now and then... especially when bored. I have shit in 3 or 4 different shopping carts right now... I might buy the stuff from one.

Somebody tell Tony there's a homeless dude with a cart right outside the cellar door. Oh never-mind, that's <your name here>.

So why is it a problem for (45% of) retailers? You provide the service, people are going to use it. Don't count your chickens before they are hatched. If it fucks up your stock count, deal with it, it' s not rocket science.... but if it is too much to handle, go all Aldi -charge a deposit until the cart is returned empty.

It's stupid.

Shopping online isn't like shopping IRL. You rarely go to a store and fill up carts and leave them sitting when the wind changes your whim. Internet shopping is sometimes more like "window shopping" with actual action in the way of putting stuff in your 'cart.' If you decide later you want to go ahead and buy it, fine. In the real life world, you would just not go as far as putting something you want but are not sure you should buy in a cart. That is a "loss" of potential purchases too, by their logic.

So instead of whining they should think of these 'potential' purchases not as eventual losses but instead as an opportunity to nudge the purchase. "I see you have the Globbo 600 in your shopping cart, but you have not yet purchased it. Did you know that the Globbo 600 can..."

you bitch, I wanted to buy the Globbo 600 yesterday, but I couldn't because someone had the last one in their cart.... I had to make do with a small aubergine.

I can't decide if I NEED the Globbo 600 or just WANTthe Globbo 600, hence the rusted out old grocery cart.

You bring up a good point, though. If someone has the last of the stock sitting in their cart, it's unavailable to Mr Mofo who has the damn cash right now to purchase the Globbo 600.

They empty your cart after a certain time frame, right?

Or sell it to the mofo with the cash and mark it as unavailable to the asshole carthog. Like Amazon does.

If Mr Retailer has too many abandoned carts, perhaps he should check his competition. He's probably charging too much, or his site sux.

Not necessarily. I just bought a book on Amazon. Before I bought it, the only had one left in stock. Afterwards, they had two.

Hell, sometimes I use the shopping cart as a form of bookmarking. Those Amazon fuckers have the crappiest search engine (for example: I search for term XYZ from the main page, and it says there are no results on the whole site. I delve deeper and search from within a specific department, or sometimes I even have to go within a specific category inside the department, and all of a sudden there are results. I can't even tell you how many times this has happened.) So when I do happen to stumble upon something I'm browsing for, or I'm considering that item but need to go to some other damn category to see if they've hidden any similar items over there... I just add the thing to my cart so I don't have to have 15 browser windows open.

Well books, yeah. Globbo 600s don't just grow on trees, you know. :p:

What was it, Field Guide to Amoeba? Counting with Negative Numbers? Accounting for Bankers?