Recent studies indicate that 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are exited
before a sale is completed. This
abandonment rate seems to be rising,
as online shoppers become more
comfortable comparing prices and
other product or service attributes. SeeWhy, a website conversion service, reported that shopping cart
abandonment rates rose from about
71 percent in mid-2010 to 75 percent
by June 2011. These figures are much
higher than the rates of about 46
percent that Forrester Research reported in early 2010. In the past, each cart abandoned was
seen as a sure sign that a sale had
been lost, but this may not necessarily
be the case. “Shopping cart abandonment is an
important part of the normal buying
cycle for many customers and for
many types of purchase,” wrote
Charles Nicholls, founder and chief
strategy officer for SeeWhy in a whitepaper on the topic. “This leads to
the conclusion that abandonment,
rather than being a rejection of the
brand’s value proposition, can be a
step in the decision process for some
buyers and for the majority of purchases. This is visible in the way
that some customers will come back
multiple times as they consider the
purchase, storing items in their
shopping carts as ‘wish lists.’” While it is important to remove barriers
to completing the sale — these
barriers are often things like price,
shipping rates, user experience, trust,
or even having to deal with a multi-
page checkout — online retailers may also want to reinforce the buying
decision, welcome returning
customers back, and being patient
about all of those abandoned carts. 1. Support the Buying Decision Encourage the shopper to return and
make a purchase with remarketing
and emails. If, as Nicholls suggests, shopping cart
abandonment is part of a natural
buying cycle as shoppers either take
time to consider the purchase or
compare prices, then marketers will
want to assure shoppers that buying the product and buying it from the
marketer's company is a good choice. There are a few tactics that can help. Remarketing seeks to show shoppers
display advertising after they have left
a site or shopping cart. Specifically, a
shopper who abandoned a cart may
start to see remarketing ads from the
store on other sites. Google AdWords, for example, makes remarketing
relatively easy. Marketers place a
conversion code on key pages,
prepare remarketing ads, and those
ads are shown across the Google
AdWords network, encouraging the shopper to come back. SeeWhy found that this sort of
remarketing boosted eventual
conversions by 18 percent. “This reinforces the need to follow up
immediately on abandoned shopping
carts since it’s clear that a customer’s
interest in making a purchase goes
cold fast,” Nicholls wrote. It may also be a good idea to email
cart-abandoning consumers shortly
after they leave a site. As an example
Bronto Software, an email-marketing
platform, found that about 13 percent
of leading brands emailed a shopper within three hours of a cart
abandonment. Collecting an email address early in the
checkout process means that the
retailer may email even an
unregistered shopper, asking, as an
example, if there was a technical issue. 2. Welcome Returning Shoppers Show a returning shopper the cart or
product front and center. If a site recognizes that a particular
shopper is visiting for a second time, it
can be a good idea to show that
shopper a larger than usual link to the
cart or even place products from the
cart directly on the landing page. SeeWhy estimated that roughly 90
percent of online sales conversions
come from shoppers already familiar
with a site. 3. Be Patient Keep abandoned shopping carts
active for at least 60 days. The longer a virtual shopping cart sits
empty, the less likely a shopper is to
return, reclaim it, and make a
purchase. With this in mind, some sites
have a tendency to clean up
abandoned carts frequently. There's little reason to do this. Virtual shopping carts do not typically
consume much memory and,
generally, have little impact on site
performance. SeeWhy suggests
keeping a cart active for at least 60
days, giving remarketing campaigns and email follow-ups time to work..visit
http://www.barilliance.com/shopping_cart_abandonment