Shopping Cart Abandonment: How an Online Consumer-based Shopping Website Alleviates Purchase-Avoidance Propensity

Learning about a product, eliciting product preferences and selecting the product option, collectively form the core of a procurement decision-making process, can often be difficult to perform. Often when a consumer faces difficulties during decision-making, he has an inclination to exhibit purchase-avoidance behavior, i.e., a tendency to postpone committing to a purchase or to seek a less painful way out that involves no action or no change (i.e., abandoning the inclination of committing to a purchase), despite having the need to consume the product/service. Such an inclination creates a devastating obstruction to Internet commerce; for example, an online manifestation of purchase-avoidance behavior is the shopping cart abandonment rate, which hovers at a disturbingly high level of approximately 70 percent even for today. This project attempts to address this issue by seeking to answer this question: how can an online Consumer-based Shopping Website reduces a consumer's purchase-avoidance propensity through assisting him in engaging initial product learning, eliciting preferences, and making choice selection? To answer this question, this project will consist of two parts. Part One, which is now completed, focuses on 1) establishing the concept of purchase avoidance as a manifestation of knowledge uncertainty, preference uncertainty and choice uncertainty, and 2) proposing a set of shopping website design artifacts to reduce consumer purchase-avoidance propensity. Part Two, if this project is funded, will focus on conducting field experiments in Hong Kong and mainland China to test the artifacts. Finally, we derive managerial implications for online merchants on designing and enhancing their shopping websites.