Retailers miss out on £18k a year through ‘surf and turf’ shopping trend

New research by Barclaycard has revealed that UK shoppers each abandon an online basket worth an average of £29.37 every month.

Furthermore, many vendors are missing out on the data or insights they need to tackle the online conversion challenge.

The study found shoppers are more fickle when buying online with 41% having abandoned a transaction at a virtual check-out in the last year, compared to 24% who have walked away from a purchase in-store.

Some six in ten retailers (59%) are unaware of the average buyer drop-out rate on their website and just 27% analyse the browsing behaviour of shoppers who abandon their baskets. A further 45% are also unable to pinpoint lost sales by gender and 41% by age group.

Also, three in ten merchants (31%) struggle to name the month when their website sees the highest level of shopping basket abandonment, while 37% are unable to identify the time of day when dropouts peak.

The UK’s ‘most abandoned’ items online
The research also highlights the most commonly-abandoned items driving the ‘surf and turf’ online trend. Brits are most likely to have abandoned women’s clothing (29%), men’s clothing (26%) and entertainment items (26%).

The items most frequently ‘window shopped and dropped’ online are:

1. Women’s knitwear
2. Leather goods, such as wallets
3. Women’s lingerie and hosiery
4. Headphones
5. Watches
6. Women’s sportswear
7. Women’s skirts
8. Books
9. Men’s trousers / jeans
10. Women’s tops & shirts

The most popular tactics retailers use to tackle basket abandonment are automated email reminders (30%) followed by a shopping basket ‘expiry period’ (19%) – which a further three in ten (29%) have plans to introduce in the future. For those that have taken this step, the average expiry period is 66 hours (2.8 days).

Clare Bailey, independent retail expert, said: “It is so important that retailers not only invest in marketing to drive footfall to their websites, but also in their payment process to ensure that the online shopping experience is as seamless and hassle-free as possible. In the same way that consumers can lose interest in a purchase when buying in-store due to long queues, they are also put off by confusing and long check-out processes online.

“As such, retailers don’t want to waste their efforts in helping customers get items into the basket only to fall at the final hurdle when customers drop out because of problems at the check-out.”