Online shopping cart deserters today may be buyers tomorrow, study says

A McAfee study, Digital Window Shopping: The Long Journey to Buy, of 163 million online shopping transactions found that 65% of all shoppers will wait a day or more to complete a purchase.

To online retailers, this behavior may appear to be shopping cart abandonment, but it could also be the sign of a cautious shopper, according to the study, released September 17.

“The good news is that those shoppers who you thought were disappearing may not be gone, they may just be delaying,” said Shane Keats, senior research analyst at McAfee.

The study also found sales conversions were 11% higher for digital window shoppers who were shown a security cue. McAfee, a security technology company, tested its own Trustmark in A/B testing and found a change in behavior when the icon was visible to a consumer.

The McAfee study is not the first to find that security concerns are a reason that shoppers abandon online carts. In April, a study by PayPal and ComScore found that 21% of buyers reported that they had stopped shopping on a site because of worries about their security.

“If you are already investing in security for your site, why not communicate that to your customers at every stage of their shopping?” Keats said. He noted that most marketers use price discounts and remarketing e-mails when consumers abandon an online shopping cart.