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Shopping Cart Abandonment

In today’s day and age more and more people are looking to the web for their shopping experience.  While this is good for the consumer, it presents a challenge for organizations to maximize conversion rates of individuals going onto their sites and ultimately completing a transaction with their shopping cart. 

Numeric Analytics knows that to fully understand your customer; you need insight into your analytic data, voice of customer and customer experience.  That is why we work closely with leading providers like Tealeaf. 

This month’s article is provided by our partner, Tealeaf.  This article addresses the challenges organizations are facing with shopping cart abandonment and areas of opportunity that have been identified.     

When Good Shopping Carts Go Bad

It’s no surprise that shopping online is different than buying in ‘the real world’.  The differences are endless and the simplest distinction is in the outcome— the conversion rate.
Many  reports put  the average online conversion rate at 2%-3% percent and the cart abandonment rate above 60%.*  Imagine your local supermarket with half full carts scattered throughout the store, people asking each other for product reviews and opinions, hunting for coupons during checkout. Yikes! But that is today’s self-created online reality.

Online channels have historically developed their own set of rules (When was the last time the supermarket asked you to add an item to your cart before you could see the price?) which could be fostering abandonment.  On the upside, these online merchants have options; when people leave items in the cart online there are ways to follow-up in hopes of getting customers to convert.

In the supermarket, if you removed an item last minute, or walked away from your cart, the cashier would never chase you down in the parking lot offering you 10% off if you buy within the next 30 minutes.

Enter the world of abandoned cart remarketing

In the example above, website analytics married to email creates a profitable remarketing opportunity for savvy merchants.  A Google search on “Abandoned Cart Remarketing” will return results featuring  best practices from all the top-tier Email service providers.  I recently sat through an informative workshop outlining the steps to scrape shopping cart data from your web analytics tool, drop in a template, add your incentive code and deliver it to the customer only minutes after they left your site.

The deeper you align your marketing efforts to your individual customer’s behavior, the better your results.  Rich insight leads to campaign modifications that can counter negative behavior and minimize the ‘Pavlovian’ traps that cause shoppers to abandon.

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* Coremetrics Benchmark 2008 December US Retail Report