Why mobile shoppers fail to follow through on purchases

A new survey released by the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) said that as much as 58 percent customers fail to make a purchase on mobile and do not complete the transaction process.
The MEF Mobile Money report gave a number of reasons why a consumer does not follow through. According to the over 6,000 global consumers surveyed in the report, online retailers ask for too many information or that the process of buying an item on a smartphone take way too long.
31 percent of the respondents said the checkout process required sensitive information that they were not prepared to give. 21 and 22 percent of the people said they were able to complete the process because of technical and connectivity issues.
About 20 percent of the respondents said they always complete the transaction while 22 percent said they have never made a mobile payment.
“M-commerce experts have lamented ‘payment abandonment’ since the market began. They still do. Every day, mobile merchants miss out on significant revenue because shoppers fail to check out. Some people simply change their minds about a purchase. But many more find the payment process too complicated, time-consuming or intrusive to continue. To repeat, this is nothing new. But the problem endures,” MEF wrote in a statement.
Of all the countries surveyed, US shoppers are the most likely to abandon their online shopping cart. Around 66 percent of American respondents said that they stopped the process before the end of the transaction and never returned. The never went up to 78.1 percent purchases abandoned on Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend.
According to the report, the industry players appear to be very aware of the problem and could be taking measures to address it. E-commerce shopping cart abandonment has been a recurrent decimal in the industry for many years. In Nigeria where most of the e-commerce platforms provide pay-on-delivery services, many orders have had to be returned because shoppers rejected them.
The report also noted that in 2014, shopping cart abandonment was as high 72 percent of all would-be purchases. Companies like Amazon are said to be looking for viable solutions like the instant one-click ordering.
MEF also recommended mobile wallets to ease the customer into the final purchase decision with credit or debit details stored in the phone itself. A shopper could checkout with a PIN or biometric signature to complete the transaction, which would speed up the process. Retailers can also explore the “buy now, pay later” which is very familiar with a lot of shoppers.