Amazon Prime Video had the perfect opportunity to sign me up as a client – but messed it up big time. Besides my frustration with the ever escalating price for DSTV and lack of satisfaction with Netflix (due to the limited content available for the South African market), I am actually an Amazon customer and actually purchased a book from them in September last year. So their Amazon Prime Video advert that I came across on YouTube was not really preaching to the unconverted as I was basically an easy sale.

I happily clicked the advert and I was redirected to a landing page on their site to initiate the sign up process. I logged in using my current Amazon account and everything was going great till I hit the billing address part. The first error was probably my fault, I thought and thus tried again. Second attempt and still nothing. Surely it has to be my browser with the problem, though I doubt that as I am using the latest version of Chrome. My laptop isn’t a cheaper one either and I use it to play memory intensive games such  as Rugby Challenge 3 and God of War so that rules out technology as a problem. Plus it cannot be my WiFi connection as my download and upload speeds are 22 Mbps and 18 Mbps respectively – so that cant be the problem.

For some reason, Amazon couldn’t let me pass the “select a billing address” page and I even I tried my old address again and again but nothing. I had no choice but to sadly abandon the check-out process and cherish my ShowMax account.

Research from various shopping cart service providers including Canadian based e-commerce company Shopify, reveals that the typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91%. The abandonment rate is the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of initiated transactions or to the number of completed transactions. There are many reasons why many shoppers abandon their shopping carts. These include:

• Complicated checkout process
• Hidden prices that appear at the time of checkout such as unexpected shipping costs
• No option to check out without signing up
• Limited payment options
• Lengthy registration process

Most of the issues are human related, however in my case the error was purely because of the seller. Retailers should make it easy for shoppers to complete the checkout process or else risk losing revenue. Online Consumer abandonment is responsible for $18 billion loss of revenue each year. Here is a comprehensive infographic with reasons why shoppers abandon their carts.