According to a recent report put together by the Baymard Institute, an independent web research company, 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That means that 67% of web shoppers looked around your site, picked out one or more things they liked enough to save into a cart, and then just...didn't buy them. Why not?

The four main reasons online browsers don't make that online purchase include:

1. Taxes and Shipping. Shipping just bumped a $29.99 purchase up to $41.50. The total price is too much. Bye-bye, customer.

2. Buyer’s Remorse. Shopping around and putting things in your cart is a guilt-free pleasure. But once you see everything you picked out, a sense of regret can outweigh the actual enjoyment of potentially using the product. Customers start to ask themselves: Do I really need this product? 67% of them say "no." 

3. It was fun to pretend. I was just browsing or comparison shopping. I never planned to buy the item, or I went somewhere else and got a better price.

4. Proble

Google recently announced that their Google Shopping feeds will no longer offer up product details in search results for free. The original program, started about 5 years ago, let manufacturers, retailers, and distributors load specific product information into Google's search system. Product detail results would show up within the main search itself or within the specialty shopping tab http://www.google.com/shopping.

The original system (called Froogle) started off gathering information by crawling existing ecommerce sites, but Google eventually decided that allowing vendors to upload their own data would make it easier for everyone. Microsoft soon followed with their own version for MSN/Bing.

Neither service charged for product listings, allowing them to crush pay-per-click price comparison sites like shopzilla, pricegrabber, nextag, bizrate, etc. But now Google has decided to switch to the very same pay-per-click model it was competing against only a short while ago.

Anti-monopol