Charles Nicholls

In 2011, the shopping cart abandonment rate continued its rise, reaching a new all-time high of 72% by the end of the year. In this blog, I’ll try to answer why the shopping cart abandonment rate has risen, despite a focus on conversion optimization by many ecommerce sites. I’ll also explain why I predict that the shopping cart abandonment rate will continue to rise in 2012.

Everything is more exaggerated over the holiday period: Retailers offer a dazzling array of new products, coupled with equally dazzling promotions, while trying to manage the constant problem of out-of-stocks. And customers make an abnormal number of purchases in a very short period and abandon their shopping carts in droves as they search for the best deals.

The 2011 holiday season was no exception. It was a bumper year again for ecommerce, with more than $37 billion in online spending in November-December, up 15% from 2010, according to comScore. And more than...

In 2006, a Wharton professor first noticed that online buyers were more likely to respond to a free shipping offer that resulted in a savings of $6.99 over an outright savings offer of $10. The explanation was that it made the online price more comparable with the offline equivalent.

This fascinating insight into buyer motivations has contributed to on a major new piece of research into online buyer behaviour, which I’ve been working on over the last few months. It will be published on December 13th as an ebook titled ‘The Science of Shopping Cart Abandonment.’

To mark Black Friday, I’ve drawn from some of this research to look at the effects of holiday promotions, and how different price points impact buyer behavior. In particular, I’ll look at the relationship between the cart value and the shopping cart abandonment rate.

What are key price points that trigger...

For many website visitors, the Online checkout user experience is far from intuitive. I just came across this great viral video from the Google Analytics marketing team on the online buying process. Taking the simple idea of what it would be like to have to go through an online shopping process in a physical store, there are many painful home truths exposed here in an amusing way.

The video follows a man trying to buy a loaf of bread in a British supermarket, but being forced to go through an online checkout process. What fun – it  should resonate well with all ecommerce teams and user experience experts alike. It’ll also make you chuckle and...

Many people have been waiting for the new iPhone 5, (including myself, stuck with a Jurassic era 3GS), so you may be disappointed with the more minor upgrade announced yesterday in the form of the new iPhone 4S. Disappointed or not, the iPhone 4S looks likely to sell by the truckload. After all, people said the iPhone 4 was disappointing, yet it sold an astonishing 1.7 million handsets in just three days after its June 2010 release.

But what does the iPhone 4S mean for mobile commerce? A raft of new features have upgraded the old 4, and while you might think these are just nice-to-haves, there are two new features, which in combination, have the potential to make mobile commerce significantly...