Is your website littered with abandoned shopping carts? According to a recent study by ScanAlert, an abandoned shopping cart doesn’t necessarily lead to shoppers abandoning your site.

ScanAlert’s report “A New Era of Digital Window Shopping: From Shopping Cart Abandonment to Purchase” covers a nine-month analysis of the shopping behavior of more than 8 million visitors to 140 retailing websites, including those run by GSI Commerce, Tiger Direct and Ritz Camera.

The report reveals what online consumers do before they buy. Consumers, on average, spend more than 19 hours deciding where to buy online for a given purchase.

Shoppers typically load the cart as a convenient way to compare costs, including those important shipping and handling charges. Shoppers then return to buy at the site that scores the highest in two basic categories:

1. Price and availability
2. Safety and trust

With digital window shopping clearly an unavoidable reality for online retailers, at the end of the day, it is not shopping cart abandonment that counts; it is ultimately about site abandonment.

ScanAlert therefore makes two recommendations:

1. Create a comfort zone for comparison shoppers, to meet concerns about the security of private information such as credit cards.
2. Move the sales focus from shopping cart abandonment to site abandonment. Abandonment rates of 50% are commonplace. Shopping carts must become convenient shopping tools, encouraging shoppers to return and buy. Saved search functionality, where returning purchasers can easily pick up where they left off, is critical to saving more of these types of purchases.

Sounds like sage advice to me. Nice work, ScanAlert.