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Flash Survey: eCommerce Cart Features

The Question:

What eCommerce cart feature do you consider most important?

The Results:

Analysis of Results:

Given the abundance of eCommerce carts on the market (the Wikipedia cart comparison entry lists a whopping 113 carts alone), it might appear the cart wars are driven by bells and whistles. But our Flash Survey respondents told a very different story of what drives their decision to choose one cart over another. One third of them chose stability and reliability as the No. 1 consideration in choosing a cart provider. The only other consideration that challenged stability in importance was product management features, chosen by 18 percent of respondents

This focus on reliability is not surprising when you look at the larger picture. According to Forrester Research, U.S. online retail sales will reach $248.7 billion dollars in 2014—that’s $7,886 per second, every day, all year long. If you assume 99.95 percent uptime (as promised by Amazon’s cloud-based servers), the resulting downtime of 4.36 hours per year could result in lost revenue of nearly $125 million dollars! That’s a lot of dough.

Clearly, flaky servers have the potential to hit online merchants where it hurts: squarely on the bottom line. It’s little wonder that our respondents overwhelmingly focus on stability and reliability over nice-but-not-necessary features like social integration, which only 3 percent identified as the most important cart feature.