Shipping Costs Deter Online Buyers the Most, While Social Nets, Apps, Not Big Factors

By John Stewart

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Surprise shipping costs are the leading cause of shopping-cart abandonment. Meanwhile, shopping apps are popular, but not used as much as you might think. And while social networks have grown in popularity every year, they have a surprisingly small influence on e-commerce buying decisions.

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These are a few conclusions from a report issued Monday by Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), a unit of New Delhi-based software firm Wingify. The firm last month surveyed more than 1,000 online shoppers in the United States.

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Asked what factors cause them to walk away from online purchases, 28% of respondents cited unexpected shipping costs. The other leading deterrents are the need to create a new-user account (23%), research rather than buying were the purpose of the session (16%), and worries about payment security (13%).

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At the same time, for all their popularity, social networks prove to be surprisingly weak influencers of online shopping and buying behavior, according to the survey.

Some 74% of respondents said that when they buy a product online, they don’t post anything about it on social networks. This is despite the fact that 53% of so-called Millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s) cite Facebook an important source of information about online shopping.

Just 25% of Millennials, considered a key demographic group for mobile and PC-based shopping, say they will look at a product touted by friends on a social network. Overall, only 16% of all desktop and mobile shoppers said they will. Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 55.

The strongest driver of online purchases? Product reviews, cited by 55%.

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As for shopping apps, some 60% of Millennials say they have one on a smart phone or tablet, compared to 40% for all respondents. But overall, some 60% of these apps aren’t used, according to the survey. “Only a small portion of those who have the shopping apps are actually using them to make purchases,” VWO says in a release.

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VWO offers testing software for Web-site operators.