Studies show a high percentage of shopping carts on ecommerce stores are abandoned. One study by Marketing Experiments indicates over 56% of all shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is completed.
There are a number of reasons to explain why shopping carts are abandoned:
- Savvy online shoppers use shopping carts to comparison shop and find the best deal;
- Some simply use shopping carts as place holders for items they eventually intend to purchase at some point in the future, perhaps waiting for discounts or further product information;
- Other customers may abandon shopping carts out of frustration, either due to technical difficulties or website errors.
Whatever the reason for shopping cart abandonment, it falls to the ecommerce store owner to remove all barriers to sales completion, and to create happy, repeat customers.
If you want to get a handle on combating shopping cart abandonment, the first thing you need is a window into your customer’s shopping cart. The Upshot Commerce Cart Manager allows the ecommerce retailer to easily view shopping cart activity on their website and take action if necessary. The extension allows the ecommerce owner to view details such as customer information, IP address, when the customer was last active, and what items are currently in the shopping cart.
If a customer is having difficulty placing an order, customer service agents can use the extension to assist them in order completion by adding or taking items out of their cart and directing the sale towards completion from the back office. The retailer also has the option to offer price breaks to the customer from the Cart Manager, if necessary. This type of strategy has proven highly effective for many retailers in the past to increase conversion. In the same Marketing Experiments study mentioned earlier, offering price incentives to customers with abandoned carts resulted in increased conversion rates of 263%!
Another highly useful tool in the retailer’s arsenal to combat abandoned shopping carts is the email reminder. In a recent article on their blog, marketing gurus at Hubspot came up with a list of “5 Best Practices for eCommerce Abandoned Cart Nurturing.” The entire article is worth a read, but the most important take away from the article is that maintaining an email campaign to re-engage users after cart abandonment is incredibly important, and can help to sometimes double your conversion rates. The Abandoned Cart Reminder Email Extension works hand in hand with the Cart Manager to accomplish just that. The extension allows the retailer to create an assortment of different types of emails with varied levels of urgency or incentives, depending on what strategy they deem best. In this way, retailers are able to gently nudge orders toward completion that would otherwise likely go unfinished.
Both of these extensions are available to users of the Upshot Commerce Core Platform, each for a fee of just $25 a month. To find out more, contact us today!