Dive Brief:

• Online consumers ditch their shopping carts two-thirds of the time, something that’s held true for several years now according to research from MarketLive, an eCommerce technology and services platform.

• Consumer habits, the growth of m-commerce, and the slowness of today’s economic recovery are the three main reasons for this, according to the report, “Shopping Cart Abandonment: How Retailers Are Using the Metric to Drive Better Results.”

• When factored in with other measures, shopping cart abandonment can yield information about retail customers — including how many times the customer has shopped on the site. Other studies have found that shipping charges and coupon searches can interrupt a web shopping session.

Dive Insight:

Retailers have been a bit confounded by shopping cart abandonment, and this study shows that not much has changed. But it does confirm that, when looked at in the overall picture of customers’ behavior on a retail website, shopping cart abandonment can yield important information. Some retailers have found that shipping charges, for example, are a surprise that leads a shopper to ditch their cart and have liberalized shipping policies as a result. Others have found that shoppers will leave their carts to search for a coupon. With two-thirds of online transactions thwarted with an abandoned cart on the line, it behooves retailers to suss out what their customers are up to and what might help seal the deal.