Anatomy of the Journey

While shopper journeys have changed thanks to headless commerce, wallets, and other journey innovations, for this journey analysis, we’ll take a traditional tour: site visit → cart → checkout → order.

There are three primary shopping visit outcomes - bounce, browse, or buy. A bounce is of course the dreaded outcome – and nearly half of visits are one (page visit) and done. A leading cause of bounce is site speed, or lack thereof: when page loads extend beyond 4 seconds, 63% of shoppers bounce, according to the Site Speed Standard.

Across the surviving visits, there is good news; 1 in 5 shoppers will add a product to cart (9.6% of all visits). During all non-bounce visits, shoppers consume more than 9 pages on mobile, of which more than a third are product detail pages (PDPs). These PDPs are the cart or not moment for shoppers, and to wit, the prime opportunity for brands to motivate shoppers.

Once a shopper creates a cart, some branches emerge. Some shoppers take no further action and simply drop the cart, though more of the carts do advance to checkout.

Checkout, though, is by no means a foregone conclusion.  On mobile devices, shoppers that complete their checkouts are in the minority - 42%.

All told, just under 3% of shoppers convert. The real story, though, is the stages along the journey, which highlight where sites see attrition, and provide guidance on where opportunity lies.

For a more in-depth look at this shopper journey, read on.