Motivations Behind Consumer Online Shopping Cart Use and Abandonment: An Abstract

Worldwide, approximately 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned (Statista 2019) leading to potentially billions of unrealized sales dollars. Such statistics make one contemplate—what motivates online shoppers to place an item in an online shopping cart to begin with? Whereas past work has investigated the motivations for online shopping cart use (e.g., Close and Kukar-Kinney 2010; Close et al. 2012) and determinants of online shopping cart abandonment (e.g., Albrecht et al. 2017) individually, there is a need for a model that jointly examines both cart use and abandonment. Despite the established managerial and economic importance, the marketing literature lacks a framework of consumer behavior with respect to online shopping carts that considers both use and abandonment, and the relationship between use and abandonment. Further, extant research has not examined cart use and abandonment with field data; Close and Kukar-Kinney (2010) called for scholars to examine the topic with e-commerce click-stream data. Thus, based on the managerial problem surrounding online shopping cart abandonment, and the void in the literature, the purpose of this research is to extend research on online shopping carts. Specifically, the objectives are threefold: (1) to provide and empirically test a theory-based conceptual model of how online consumer motivations influence shopping cart use and shopping cart abandonment, (2) to examine the relationship between online shopping cart use and online shopping cart abandonment, and (3) to address the call to examine online shopping cart research with behavioral data, and provide a theoretical framework linking online shopping motivations with actual shopping behaviors. We used a field study to obtain consumer shopping click-stream data from a large British multinational retailer specialized in clothing, footwear and home products. The company has over 500 stores globally with large presence in the UK. The total number of observations used for analysis is one million, spanning session visits from 07/28/2018 till 08/08/2018. Overall, the research demonstrates that both goal-driven and hedonic motivations are reasons for consumers to add items to their online shopping cart. At the same time, these motivations may also be reasons for abandoning the cart when the final purchase decision needs to be made.