Forum Moderators: buckworks
Thanks.
1. Calculate shipping. You've covered that.
2. Find a total price for all items I'm interested in.
3. Use it as a holder or checklist when price comparing.
When I'm done, if I decide not to buy or find a better price elsewhere... I abandon the cart. Sometimes I'm not ready to buy (ie window shopping), and use the cart as a reference for what I'm looking at. In that case, what I've found from my own experience is that wishlists (or saved carts) are far more likely to cause me to return to the site and finally make a purchase at a later date.
Just some observations from my own habits.
So I convinced myself it was because they wanted to see how much shipping is to their location.
This isn't an answer to your specific question ... but a validation of your "suspicion"...
Not an hour ago, I entered a shopping cart on a site, to try to find out what the shipping charge was...
I had to complete the entire process (name, address, credit card, etc.)... before I would get to the final "checkout" -- and so I left... without finding out what the shipping was. I just didn't want to enter all that personal info.
No where on the site, could I find any info on shipping charges -- including using the "site search" function.
Thanks Laker and Duskrider for your comments.
Laker, that's why I have "Free Shipping" all over the homepage so hopefully there is no question about how much shipping is...but I suppose shoppers could miss that...
1) As others mentioned, to see the shipping charges. I want to know the total price before I buy. And, I may want to get that total and then compare with other sites before I choose where I will buy from.
2) To see what payment methods are accepted. A lot of sites don't list the payment methods they accept, and you cannot find out until you get to the checkout. Maybe I prefer to pay with American Express. Or PayPal.
I don't know why so many sites seem to want to "hide" the payment methods they accept.
Dont get too stressed out about abandonded carts. We all get them.
8. They're "window shopping"
9. Not serious about buying in the first place, or just playing around.
10. Researching, or planning a purchase they will make on "payday." We've identified abandoned carts with exactly the same items purchased days and weeks later.
While it's good to review abandoned orders and investigate possibilities, this has the potential to drive you insane. I have spend hours and hours, weeks on end, chasing the whys, I almost fell in. :-)
One of the things I did that answered the shipping question - in our administration I added a button and a text field to enter the most distant zip code to "test" shipping of abandoned orders. After a few weeks of looking at these and checking the shipping, comparing it against the rates of the respective shipping service web sites, we came to the conclusion that in our case the shipping couldn't possibly be the problem. It's something else.
