What's sadder than abandonment? The minute you hear about the tragic plight of these legions of abandoned shopping carts, you can almost see their big, sad cartoon eyes welling up with tears. Some writers, dialing up the pathos even more, refer to them as "orphaned" shopping carts. The clear implication: You can reach out to these helpless innocent victims of callous online shoppers, or you can turn the page. ...

OK, I'll admit it right up front: I've abandoned more than my share of shopping carts at various online retail sites without so much as a twinge of conscience. After all, it's not as if my cart is taking up real space, clogging up an aisle, getting in people's way. It's not as if some overworked, underpaid digital serf has to scurry around refolding all the T-shirts and turtlenecks and tank tops and yoga pants and barn jackets and swimsuits and putting them all back on their virtual shelves.

So, when I started seeing stories about the "problem" of these abandoned carts, I suspected the real problem was wishful thinking on the part of retailers. Customers had piled all this stuff into their carts, as if they meant to buy it, but then they hadn't. The people selling the stuff wished they had. And because, like everybody, they think everything is all about them, they assumed there must be something they could do about it — some way they could 'solve" this "problem" and capture what they imagined to be the "lost" revenue it represented. (In fact, some retailers have hired services to dog your digital footsteps and remind you of all the lovely things you left in the cart at their site, and maybe even offer you free shipping if you go back and buy them.)

Be serious, I thought. If you're going to count the $2,700 I didn't pay for the Loro Piana cashmere shawl I left in my shopping cart as lost revenue, you might as well add in another $3,000 for the shearling coat I looked at longingly in a store window last fall and also didn't buy. And where do you draw the line? What about the $905 for the red crocodile tote I was admiring in Vogue the other day but am quite unlikely to purchase. Is somebody going to count that as lost revenue, too?

The thing is, if my failure to purchase these goods is a problem, it isn't one that retailers can solve by hiring consultants and streamlining their checkout process. Or any other way — unless they can dig up some long-lost and recently deceased rich uncle who turns out to have left me his billions.

Sorry, stores. It's not your problem; it's mine. I'm walking away from these shopping carts because I can't pay for the stuff I put in them. I didn't expect it to add up to so much. Or I just changed my mind. Or I remembered I look awful in that color. How can you not see that?

Oops — turns out they can and do. As Tealeaf's Vice President of World Wide Marketing Geoff Galat explains it to me, online merchants know that people "abandon" shopping carts for all sorts of reasons. They know we fill one up, go off to check the prices for similar merch at three other sites, and then forget where we started — or else the phone rings, or we feel obliged to go back to work before somebody notices we're shopping, or "Project Runway" comes on, or somebody wants his dinner, or it's way past bedtime and we can't keep our eyes open for another minute.

Cart abandonment prompted by such externalities may leave retailers with a wistful ships-that-pass-in-the-night sense of missed opportunity, but what really worries them are carts abandoned by customers who'd actually like to buy the things in them, but can't. They click on "checkout," fill in their credit card number, click "confirm" — and then, nothing. Or the site decides their Visa number doesn't compute, or it keeps endlessly flipping them back to the previous screen, or it suddenly decides one of the things in the cart is no longer available in tangerine, or it wants to charge them extra to ship their package to Bolivia even though they actually live in Bolivia, Ill.

Now that I think of it, I've run into a few of these snafus myself. I end up wanting to throw the computer out the window. The good news, according to a recent study commissioned by Tealeaf, is that they aren't happening quite as often as they used to. Tealeaf makes software that tracks individual online transactions step-by-step for retail sites, so retailers can figure out where the glitches are and fix them. Sometimes they'll even contact the frustrated shopper to apologize and ask if she still wants that tangerine cardigan.

But they usually only follow up when they have evidence of intent to buy. Serial cart abandoners who haven't clicked "checkout" and "confirm" don't have to worry about being tracked down and inveigled into paying for stuff they liked well enough to put in their carts but had too much sense to actually pay for.

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.