While Thanksgiving weekend (including Black Friday) is typically seen as the largest shopping weekend of the year, that doesn’t mean that people are just buying without any thought. The fact is, however, that even on this very busy shopping weekend, the majority of items that are added to digital shopping carts are actually abandoned.
According to a study from Barilliance, about 75% of all shopping carts were abandoned. This was based on 18 million visits to retail websites over the weekend. They looked at abandonment rates by geographic location, and device type.
The United States had the most abandoned carts at 74.5%. The global average was 72.5%, and Spain had the lowest rate at 70%. Even that low rate, however, represents billions of dollars lost by online retailers.
The study also found that those shopping with mobile devices abandon the shopping cart at a rate 15.9% higher than those on a desktop. In addition, the average order size goes up by 10.6% on a desktop.
Some good news for savvy marketers, however, is that emails sent to shoppers who have abandoned their carts seem to do a good job at getting them to return. These emails over the holiday weekend generated an average of $5.64 per email, which is quite impressive. This is even more important when remembering that these emails are only going to people who left the site without buying once, so it is essentially recovered money.
