FURTHERING PSYCHOLOGICALUNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMINGCOST-RELATED SHOPPING CARTABANDONMENT WITH GEOLOCATIONCROWDSOURCING

Abstract

Online shopping cart abandonment continues to be a widely studied phenomenon in the e-commerce space. While many existing studies are designed to analyze a breadth of factors, our specialized study aims to further our understanding of purchase hesitation and subsequent cart abandonment specifically caused by shipping fees.

In order to explore shipping fee-related purchase hesitation, we employed a two part study in which we 1) collected data regarding the amount of additional fees a user is willing to pay at different price points as well as the user's psychological responses to these fees, then we 2) integrated crowdsourcing techniques into the results of part 1 and proposed a new interaction model, CrowdShop, that aims to crowdsource users' orders together based on geo-location proximity in order to reach a minimum free shipping threshold. Furthermore, we presented CrowdShop as a functioning prototype to gauge user response and sentiment. In both parts of the study, we employed a grounded-theory approach along with statistical methods for the analysis of the data.

In order to reach a free shipping threshold for online orders, we found that many users combine purchasing efforts with closely-located family members and friends. However, user success of reaching a minimum order amount was hindered by the manual nature of such a collaboration. Through user testing sessions, we received positive responses in favor of Crowdshop's ability to streamline and automate collaboration efforts. However, there still exists opportunities for further development regarding user concerns with CrowdShop.