In a recent article I wrote titled 10 Proven Methods to Decrease Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate I detailed a number of strategies you could use to reduce your cart abandon rates.

If you use PayPal as a payment method, and depending on the technical ability of your cart, you might have had trouble with abandon carts in the past. However a recent survey conducted by comscore on behalf of PayPal aimed to answer the question why shoppers abandon their carts.

The survey revealed that largest single reason online shoppers abandoned their carts was due to high shipping costs. Additional factors were security concerns and check-out processes that lacked convenience.

The survey also found that if merchants had provided shipping costs upfront, this might have persuaded 40 percent of participants to complete the purchase.

As a result of the survey findings, PayPal recently released the PayPal Instant Update API — a new Express Checkout feature.

The Instant Update API enables merchants to provide customers with the critical information they need — when they need it — in order to make the purchase.

Merchants who integrate the new API, can now show order details which include shipping options, insurance choices and tax totals, earlier in the check-out process.

Customers will still pay on your site when using Express Checkout; however, with the new tools they do not need to reenter shipping, billing, or payment information because the information is already available from PayPal. This helps merchants offer a more simplified checkout process while providing customers with what they are looking for.

Additional Reasons Shoppers Abandoned Carts

A comprehensive list of the most frequent reasons why shoppers abandoned their carts is below.

• High shipping charges: 46 percent
• Wanted to comparison shop: 37 percent
• Lack of money: 36 percent
• Wanted to look for a coupon: 27 percent
• Wanted to shop offline: 26 percent
• Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24 percent
• Item was unavailable at checkout: 23 percent
• Couldn’t find customer support: 22 percent
• Concerned about security of credit card data: 21 percent

If you are looking for more information on the PayPal Instant Update API you can read about implementing it using any of these links:

Implementing the Instant Update API

The PayPal Blog