Shopping cart abandonment can be caused by a variety of reasons. This Q3 2009 Forrester study conducted across 3,332 online customers shows that high shipping and handling costs could be a major reason for the abandonment. The study also shows that especially women shoppers are interested in “window shopping” and would like to “save the cart” for a later purchase.
In addition to the hard metrics shown in the Forrester study, I noted earlier the “shopping experience” on your website is also an important contributor to the shopping cart abandonment problem. Customers are often confused by the site navigation or “turned off” by the poor aesthetics of the site.
However, in order to tackle the abandonment problem on your webstore, the first step is to measure what your shopping cart abandonment rate is – a metric can be easily measured by the free Google Analytics tool.