Segmenting & profiling the deflecting customer: understanding shopping cart abandonment

One of the key factors affecting the e-commerce in any country is the incident of shopping cart abandonment (SCA). The phenomenon occurs either when the consumer is searching for products or when the items have been selected and the consumer is moving towards checkout. The current research paper adopts the latter perspective in studying the behavior. Further, rather than looking at the manifestations of the behavior and the role of elements such as website characteristics that may be responsible for its occurrence; the paper looks at specific antecedents namely- perceived risks associated with an online purchase decision as well as mental accounting and budgeting that the consumer may carry out when faced with a decision dilemma. A 5-point, 20 item Likert scale questionnaire was designed and validated before conducting the filed study. A usable sample of 350 adult online consumers who had indulged in SCA, was segmented based their usage behavior into three distinct segments of low, medium and high SCA. Further, a segment comparison indicated stark difference in the perception of the perceived risks they experienced, as well as the mental accounting they carried out while making the final purchase. The higher was the incidence of perceived risk, more was the likelihood of SCA. The high SCA group also demonstrated significant cognitive dissonance on account of the mental budgeting they considered for the product/category. The research has important academic and market driven implications that may be critical in understanding and dealing with the phenomenon.