Via Seth Godin and Enrique Dans: why do people happily abandon their online shopping cart at checkout time, while you hardly ever see orphaned carts in bricks-and-mortar stores?

The statistics cited by Enrique Dans are dramatic: more than 50% of virtual carts abandoned. It's hard to believe that we can account for such a number with the obvious culprits: deceptive pricing, unexpectedly expensive delivery, or the sudden realization of the merchant's covered eye, hook and wooden leg.

Here's another hypothesis of what might be going on: what if shopping online was actually too easy? Yeah, I know it sounds ludicrous, but hold with me for a second. When you go shopping to a traditional store you have to drive there; park; pick a cart; walk around for a while, looking for stuff; choose and pick. When it's time to checkout you have made quite an investment, and you feel it. You are committed.

Compare this with online shopping. Sitting comfortably, listening to music, chatting with friends, and at the same time browsing through virtual shelves in two stores at the same time, in two firefox tabs. There's no perceived investment, and no commitment.

We could test the hypothesis by looking at online store log data: if it is correct, there will be a positive correlation between time spent filling the cart and successful checkout. If this is so, there might be also an interesting relationship between the number of items in the cart and the probability of the cart going through.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? You obviously don't want your potential customers to be jumping hoops in order to reach your checkout line having made an investment… or do you? Well, maybe it depends on the hoops.

This reminds me of a description by Paul Graham in his landmark article The Other Road Ahead. He is talking about Viaweb, a pioneer online store software that allowed merchants to setup their own stores. Viaweb was successful and sold to Yahoo. Here's Paul Graham:

You should expect to be able to test-drive any Web-based application for free, just by going to the site where it's offered. At Viaweb our whole site was like a big arrow pointing users to the test drive.

After trying the demo, signing up for the service should require nothing more than filling out a brief form.

I actually tried it once, many years ago. By the time you got to the credit card page, you had spent there quite some time, you knew how to operate the software, and you had an online store set up. They somehow managed to give you interesting hoops to jump through.