Online shopping cart abandonment: a critique and guide to measuring its drivers

For e-tailers, the abandonment of the shopping cart by customers is a major challenge, with as many as 75% of shopping carts being abandoned after shoppers place an item in the cart. Consumer researchers have researched this phenomenon for the past two decades, identifying the factors that inhibit shoppers from completing their purchases on the e-tailer sites they visit. These studies have advanced our understanding of various drivers of online shopping cart abandonment (OSCA), but their findings suffer from conceptual incongruencies in the measures of the variables of interest. We identify gaps in researcher conception of how OSCA drivers are and should be measured. To remedy these gaps, we develop a framework for improved measurement in future research. The adoption of new measurement conception will not only yield better estimations of the effects of various drivers but also will be founded on sounder theory. Without these measurement improvements, future studies of cart abandonment will continue to fall short of valid and meaningful findings.