DISCUSSION
Will a universal cart change online shopping?
Written by RetailWire Staff
Photo: Shop.co
Amazon.com customers have grown accustomed to an online checkout process that allows them to order goods from multiple vendors with a single click. But for those doing their shopping on various individual retailer and brand websites, payments become more complicated. This is a problem Shop.co hopes to address with its new browser extension.
Shop.co bills itself as the first true universal cart and, according to a press release, is hotly anticipated with 20,000 users on its waiting list. The browser extension allows users to shop from any site, and rather than checking out from individual shopping carts, check out all at once through the plugin. The extension also includes features like a saved shopping history and a coupon finder. Retailer participation is not required for the plugin to function. It has been rolled out to 2,000 users so far, and has reportedly saved users 12 minutes and $5 per order on average.
The press release did not clarify how the average savings in time and money were calculated.
While it’s easy to think of today’s online shoppers always proceeding through the checkout with Amazon-esque ease, the numbers don’t reflect that. A 2016 study from Baymard.com on online cart abandonment indicated that, while 61 percent of those who abandon their online carts do so because of unexpected costs, other reasons for abandonment relate to convenience. For instance, 35 percent of the 1,044 polled said they abandoned their cart because a website wanted them to create an account, 27 cited an overly-complicated checkout process, and 8 percent said there were not enough payment methods.
Shop.co is not the only company trying to streamline the online checkout process. SaaS provider Zoho recently released a solution called Zoho Checkout, according to ComputerWorld. The software enables businesses to easily build and manage checkout pages and avoid difficulties with integration and payment processing.
Mobile shopping is another area with a cart abandonment problem. A third of people report abandoning a mobile purchase due to an overly invasive signup process, according to Brand-E, and 20 percent report doing so because checkout takes too long.
This is an area in which Shop.co also intends to make inroads, with a mobile version planned for the coming year.