Member Article

Cart abandonment: Poor login experiences can cost UK businesses more than their reputation

Most consumers visit a website without signing up or making a purchase, whether that’s buying a pair of jeans, subscribing to a newsletter, or booking a flight. Shopper behaviour teams across industries have been investigating this issue, called cart abandonment, for decades. Now, as lockdown restrictions are lifted in the UK, brands are looking for fresh ideas to attract and convert customers across channels.

Identity management leader Auth0 and YouGov recently surveyed more than 1,200 business leaders and 8,000 consumers around the world about their expectations for login and sign-up processes. The findings from this research shine a light on why people abandon carts and login boxes, and what online businesses can do about it.

The survey found that about half of consumers (49%) are frustrated by long login and sign-up forms. However, less than half of businesses surveyed (45%) allow consumers to sign up for their app in one minute or less – and about one in five (21%) say the login process for returning customers takes more than one minute.

According to Auth0, nearly 9 in 10 consumers (85%) admit to reusing passwords for more than one account, and that their main frustrations with the sign-up process for new apps are password-related. Consumers want alternatives to passwords, including biometrics and passwordless authentication. However most businesses fall short of consumer expectations for these login experiences.

This study found that 8 in 10 organisations (85%) admit potential customers abandon their cart or sign-up process. One in four businesses (25%) think it’s unlikely that a customer will abandon their services because of the sign-up process, while one in three (35%) think it’s unlikely that login processes are the cause of abandonments.

However, the research shows that more than 8 in 10 consumers (83%) abandon their shopping cart or registration attempt due to a complex login process.

Around the world UK consumers (85%) are more likely than those living in Germany (78%) and Japan (76%) to abandon their cart or sign up to online content if the login process is too arduous.

Organisations from Asia-Pacific countries are much more likely than their European counterparts to attribute cart abandonment to sign-up processes (Australian 66%, Japanese 63%, and Singaporean 60%, compared to French 49%, British 46%, and German 41%).

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by D Baker .