Following Up With Abandoned Shopping Carts
June 3, 2009
When you have the statistics in front of you it can be amazing how many people leave the cart at the last minute even after they have put all their details in. From my experience the value in the abandoned carts can be as much as 10% of overall sales.
It is the equivalent of a supermarket shopper going round the whole store piling their shopping trolley up with goods, letting the clerk scan in the items and then simply walking away. Odd!
But they are several reasons why this happens.
Firstly not all of your buyers are going to be Internet savvy and many of them will think that they have done everything needed to complete their order. Perhaps they do not see the ‘confirm’ button or your software simply fails to do its job.
Secondly people get distracted at the last minute, by a phone call, their boss walking over etc… and they forget about the order they were making.
Thirdly some people just lose momentum and stop before they buy.
As you can see these people are pretty much the hottest leads a business could have. They are ready to buy, have chosen what they want and so you would be mad not to follow up with them.
So how do you follow up and when.
Timing is key and too early and you risk annoying people who are still thinking about their purchase, too late and they will forget why they were buying or have bought somewhere else. Most people seem to say between 2 hours and 12 hours after cart abandonment. If you are tracking everything you can experiment with this. But I would suggest 12 hours is a good starting point.
The cart abandon shopper should be sent a polite email telling them two things. That if they think they have completed their order that they have not and here is the link to complete their order. And if they forgot about their order here is the link again to the checkout page where they can complete.
The link that takes them to your site should be to the final stage of checkout where they last left off and all most of these people will need to do will be to enter payment details and press submit. You should not take them back to the home page of the site and expect to fill their cart again.