Pursuing Abandoned Shopping Carts
A customer comes to your website, adds several items to their cart, and then abandons their cart and leaves your website. How maddening! You don't even know why they left. So what can you do about it?
Some reasons they might not be checking out.
- They are just comparison shopping or window shopping.
- They were scared off by the shipping costs.
- They had technical issues checking out.
- There was a lack of direction or some confusion.
- Maybe the website didn't give them the correct assurances.
And there are a lot of reasons not listed here.
How intrusive do you want to be?
Visitors on the internet are hardly anonymous. If a visitor has been to your store before and given you personal information, there is a good chance that you know who they are as soon as they come back to your website. If a visitor has entered personal information in the checkout area, but does not complete the checkout, you should definitely know who this visitor is.
Do you want to survey them about why they didn't complete the checkout? Perhaps with a popup survey? Or spamming them with an email survey? How about sending them an email coupon for the items in their cart that they didn't purchase?
How intrusive should you be with contacting this visitor? Maybe you just want to send an email asking them about their recent shopping experience?
Taking a hint from the offline world.
There is a great article at Future Now about gorilla marketing. To quote the opening line "In the offline world, have you ever been chased by retail staff because you opted not to buy something at their store?"
My Opinion
Nobody likes intrusive or pushy people. If a person abandons your website in the pre-checkout area (on a product page or cart page) you shouldn't contact them (via email, popup survey, phone, etc). In an offline world, if someone entered your store, and then left, you would never chase them. Having a feedback button on your site and a clear phone number for customer support are both good ideas to get this visitor to contact you. Look at ways to improve your conversion via A/B tests is also a good idea.
How about if a visitor enters the checkout area, completes their peronal information and shipping information, but fails to enter their payment information? Here it gets a little more interesting. Having a tactful phone call from customer service might be good idea to try. (In an offline world, if someone entered the checkout area, and then decided to leave, a good clerk would ask them if they could assist in anyway - without being pushy). I would side with a tactful phone call more than an automated generic email, or any kind of spam email. Take a hint from some of the ideas in this article.