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What Online Retailers Will Do to Get You to Click ‘Buy’

Almost 69% of online shopping carts that contain at least one item are later abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute, an e-commerce consultancy based in Copenhagen which analyzed 31 studies over the past few years. That is up about three percentage points from 2012, says Christian Holst, the institute’s co-founder. (scroll down for more text…)

The hunt continues as the shopper visits more websites and discovers more options throughout the day.

Many factors lead shoppers to abandon their digital shopping carts, Mr. Holst says. Mobile phones seem to make people more likely to jump around, he says, putting them into browsing mode. Unexpected extra costs at checkout—sales tax, shipping fees—are responsible for 33% of abandonments, Mr. Holst’s firm has found. Another 23% are abandoned when shoppers are forced to create an account, an often cumbersome task requiring them to think up a username and password and enter personal details. And 18% of abandonments result from a “complicated” checkout process.

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus says its shoppers often visit an expensive designer item multiple times before purchasing. The company targets follow-up ads with product images and messages about store events and the Neiman Marcus brand. For a regular customer, Neiman says a sales associate might follow up using a messaging app, such as WhatsApp .

Follow-up ads can annoy consumers, though, says Krista Berry, chief digital officer of department store Kohl’s and many aren’t shy about letting stores know when they receive emails that seem incorrectly targeted. “Everyone is working on data to be more real-time and of-the-moment, or curated,” she says. “We have come a long way, but we’re just not quite there yet.”

Kohl’s this year started offering shoppers access to a single digital shopping cart across their devices, whether smartphone, tablet or laptop. That is a cornerstone of the retail industry’s efforts to fully integrate digital and store inventories, a practice the industry calls “omnichannel” retailing.

That means if you shop on your smartphone in the morning while waiting at the doctor’s office, anything you dropped in your shopping bag will show up later when you continue shopping on your computer at work or your tablet at home.

Retailers say a person who likes to window shop on a mobile device will be more likely to buy later if items remain in the shopping bag. Many shoppers like to narrow down choices on smartphones, then buy later using a desktop or laptop.

Mark Rogers, a 30-year-old Austin, Texas, father of a newborn son, says he feels paralyzed by the thousands of product options, reviews and blog posts he finds when he shops online for baby gear.

“Instead of helping you chose something, these websites present you with 99 other alternatives for a product, and you feel like you probably missed the best one,” he says.

Sheena Iyengar, author of the 2010 book “The Art of Choosing” and a professor on leadership and entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School, says the conundrum is understandable. In the pre-digital world, consumers would shop until they had created a manageable choice set, or realm of available options. They were limited by the number of shops in their town or neighborhood. “But now,” Dr. Iyengar says, “no matter how much searching they do, consumers still feel like there may be something out there they might have missed.”

Neiman Marcus uses what’s known as micro data, specific information about an individual consumer’s geographic location and past digital purchasing behavior among other characteristics, to target reminders to customers who may have abandoned items, says John Koryl, the company’s president of stores and online.

It is a delicate balance of reinforcing the physical product in the window-shopper’s mind and recreating the “moment of inspiration” that may have originally piqued the person’s interest, he says. “We don’t want to just sell you the shoe you put in the cart. We want to form a relationship with you,” Mr. Koryl says.

Ms. Berry of Kohl’s says the company’s digital-research arm has begun to identify consumer behaviors specific to different device types, and to customize the shopping experience according to the device.

Desktop shoppers spend about 12 minutes on Kohls.com, compared with seven minutes for smartphone shoppers, the company says. Customers who have been directed to the site from a promotional email tend to be brand loyal. Customers who arrive from a search engine usually want to get in and get out. Ms. Berry’s team refers to these as “spear fishermen.”

Tony Hsieh, chief executive of online shoe retailer Zappos, says his company tackles the abandoned-cart problem by encouraging customers to call the company on the phone. Zappos’ phone number is displayed on every page of the website and in follow-up emails about abandoned products.

“The call itself doesn’t necessarily turn into an order, but it is an opportunity for us to humanize the shopping experience,” Mr. Hsieh says. “The idea is to develop that feeling that you are buying from a friend and not a faceless corporation,” he says. And after all, he says, people don’t like to abandon their friends.

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