Online shoppers are taking an average of 34 hours to complete purchases after their first visit to a Web site, according to a recent study by ScanAlert. This is an increase of more than half a day, the online security auditor reports.
In a study of more than 2.6 million sales of a cross section of products from impulse-buy items to considered purchases generated by 128 million visitors, the average delay between initial Web site visits and initial purchase in 2007 was 34 hours and 19 minutes, according to ScanAlert. In 2005, the average delay was just over 19 hours.
“Today, online consumers are in even less of a hurry to click the buy button,” said the report.
Moreover, 44% of purchases in the study were made by shoppers more than three hours after their first visit, and one in four purchases were made by shoppers more than three days after their first visit, the report said.
“The increasing length of time from initial visit to actual purchase shows that consumers are doing far more comparison-shopping research than they did in the 2004/2005 time period,” said the report.
Among the study’s recommendations is that online merchants should begin to think of shopping cart abandonment as “simply the act of moving onto the next comparison shopping opportunity.”
The report continued: “Retailers should think of shopping carts as convenient shopping tools and encourage shoppers to save their searches for return visits.” The ability to save the contents of shopping carts “where returning purchasers could pick up where they left off would save more of these types of purchases,” the report said.
ScanAlert also recommended that online retailers rethink their pay-per-click advertising programs.
“Someone who clicked on your 50 cent keyword ad and didn’t immediately convert is not necessarily a forgone half dollar investment,” the report said. “There is a good possibility that she will return and buy.”
