Events

Online shopping cart abandonment is a growing problem for e-commerce merchants worldwide as it causes a significant loss of their online revenue. The objective of this study is to examine the antecedents and recovery mechanism of online shopping cart abandonment. First, using a longitudinal data of consumers’ online orders, the authors show that cart characteristics, payment methods, marketing communications, situational factors, and consumer characteristics have significant effects on their online shopping cart abandonment behavior. In this regard, cart breadth, cart discount, delivery cost, the time gap between online orders, and morning time increase the likelihood of online shopping cart abandonment. On the other hand, cart depth, dynamically priced items in the cart, top-selling items in the cart, bank payment, cash on delivery payment method, email newsletters, and registered customers reduce the likelihood of online shopping cart abandonment. We find monetary value of cart has a nonlinear effect on the likelihood of online shopping cart abandonment. Second, for the same set of customers, we collect additional data from a marketing program intervention where we find that sending reminder emails reduces the rate of online shopping cart abandonment significantly. In fact, reminder emails lessen the probability of online shopping cart abandonment by as much as five percent, which is a significant recovery of lost online revenue in cart abandonment. Furthermore, we also report differential effects of reminder emails and antecedents on varying degree of cart recovery, such as full vs. major vs. minor recoveries. Based on these results, the study offers critical managerial insights to online retailers in addressing the issue of online shopping cart abandonment and recommends them to exploit reminder emails as a digital nudge in their repertoire of recommendation system.