3 Tips for Managing Shopping Cart Abandonment

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.

E-commerce cart abandonment and emails

An abandoned shopping cart is like a broken promise. For the merchant, there is a lost sale and unclaimed revenue. For the shopper, there is an unfulfilled need or want. Fortunately, a quick series of cart abandonment emails may renew that promise, helping both the customer and the retailer.

Roughly two out of every three (67.35 percent) ecommerce shopping carts are abandoned after consumers have selected items and placed those items in the cart, according to April 2013 data from the Baymard Institute, which averaged documented online shopping cart abandonment rates from 19 separate studies conducted in the last few years.

Shopping cart abandonment can happen for a number of reasons. Forrester Research, as an example, has consistently blamed shipping and handling costs. Imagine that a shopper finds the perfect $25 item, adds it to the cart, and learns that it will cost another $15 — more than half of the product’s price — just to ship. At other times, a shopper might have become distracted, or maybe the shopper just wanted to compare prices from other sites.

Automated, behavior-driven emails — often referred to as cart abandonment emails — have demonstrated an ability to reengage shoppers, save sales, and benefit both the shopper and the merchant. There are a number of ideas about what is the best way to use cart abandonment emails. What follows are thoughts about some of the key shopping cart abandonment best practices and how small or mid-sized merchants might apply them.

Collect Emails Early

For a shopping cart abandonment email series to be effective, you must have a valid email to send those messages to. If there's no email, there is no chance to reclaim the lost sale.

Make certain that one of the first, if not the first, questions that you ask a customer is for her email address. Also, you want to ensure that the email address is either automatically saved with the shopping cart or saved after the shopper submits the first step (often the contact information) in the checkout process. It is important to note that you will be creating a business relationship, if you will, with the customer. This will allow you to send transaction-related emails, like the cart abandonment emails, without sending spam.

Plan a Series of Emails

Many email experts recommend a series of shopping cart abandonment emails with about two or three emails sent at scheduled intervals.

The first email that you send might ask the shopper if he needs any help completing the transaction. Perhaps, there was a technical issue, or maybe he wasn’t certain about the proper size. As an example, Cooking.com’s shopping cart abandonment email says, “If you had trouble checking out or found something confusing, please contact our customer service department by email at support@cooking.com or by phone…”

The second email in the series might simply inform the shopper that you are “holding” her items. It might even make sense to add a deadline. Here are a couple of examples.

“We have saved your selected items, but remember many of our popular and limited-edition styles sell out quickly. Please place your order soon.”

“Have you met Dash the Dog? He keeps the Zappos.com site running smoothly so our customers can shop with ease! Dash has been looking after the items you left in your shopping cart. While Dash doesn't mind watching your order, he wants you to know that your items have been asking for you and would like for you to return.”

Finally, for a third email consider making a follow up offer. Often this offer could include a discount or even free shipping, such as, “We were just about to put away the items you had in your shopping cart, but we thought we’d give you another chance to claim them. We are even going to include free two-day shipping if you order in the next four hours.”

Send Emails Soon

While conversion rates from successful shopping cart abandonment emails vary greatly, sending the first email in the series within 60 minutes of the cart abandonment can dramatically boost the recovery rate.

SaleCycle, as an example, reported in 2012 that merchants who sent the first shopping cart abandonment email within 20 minutes of when the shopper left the cart would enjoy about a 5.2 percent conversion rate while retailers that waited 24 hours to send the first cart abandonment follow up experienced about a 2.6 percent conversion rate.

Measure, Compare, Adapt

It is vital that online retail marketers continue to monitor, measure, and adjust a shopping cart abandonment email series. For example, the above data about when to send the first email in a series might not apply to online retailers selling large or expensive items.

The best practice is to monitor the cart abandonment campaign. Make small, distinct adjustments and compare the results. Does changing the subject line impact conversions? Does including pictures of the items in the abandoned cart help?

Test each change for a statistically significant audience and compare the results.

How to choose KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a mode to measure and monitor the performance of an organization, business unit, department or specified activity. They are focused on activities that are critical to the success of the business. It is not to be confused with Key Result Indicators (KRIs), Result Indicators (RIs) and Performance Indicators (KIs), which serve slightly different purposes.

KPIs have to be chosen carefully in order to give valuable information. On one hand, the target has to be defined clearly to choose the correct measure. Once, this has been defined, the adequate KPIs have to be chosen. These should be defined in a way that is understandable, measurable and meaningful. So, there must be a strong link between the activity measured and the input factor observed. This depends very much on the department and the specific activity in question, because a KPI should tell the manager in the end, what actions need to take place.

To give an example: The number of parts rejected due to low quality would not serve to indicate performance in Marketing, but might be very valuable to quality control or supplier evaluation. They might give information whether new frame agreements with the suppliers give a positive impulse on the delivered quality or if more drastic actions have to be considered.

SMART objectives as known from project management also apply in this case. Ideally, KPIs should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.

These modes of performance measurement are often linked to performance improvement projects. Usually, the Web Controlling Objectives are not only to measure the performance of a certain activity to indicate the status-quo, but to measure actual improvement or effectiveness and efficiency over a period of time. The number of visitors of an online store could indicate the effectiveness of a Marketing activity, a mailing, for instance.

e-commerce KPI to Track ROI and Conversion Rates

There are 10 mandatory KPIs used to track performance, return on investment and conversion rates for ecommerce websites. Known as eCommerce KPI - these ratios and percentages are used in addition to traditional conversion rates and return on investment calculations. These KPI need to be trended over time ideally month after month, but can be as granular as weekly measurements. Once there is a year's worth of data, seasonal fluctuations will become apparent, as well as site performance measurement indicators. When analyzing performance and overall ecommerce health, these KPI need to be compared against the same time last year. This takes seasonality out of the equation and factors for sustainability.

1. AVERAGE ORDER VALUE (AOV) - total revenue divided by orders
2. BUYING SESSIONS - visitor sessions with a purchase divided by total sessions
3. NEW VS RETURNING VISITOR % - new visitors divided by all unique visitors
4. RATIO NEW to RETURNING VISITORS - new visitors divided by returning visitors
5. CUSTOMER RETENTION RATE - previous unique buyers divided by previous unique visitors
6. ORDER CONVERSION RATE - orders divided by visitors
7. BUYER CONVERSION RATE - buyers divided by visitors
8. SHOPPING CART ABANDONMENT RATE - percent of sessions where item was added to cart but the order was not completed
9. ORDERS PER SESSION - orders divided by sessions
10. ITEMS PER ORDER - items divided by orders

The ratios and measurements for these KPI vary from site to site, and are highly dependent on the industry and online business model. The ideal way to set these markers, is to either select a time range where the site was performing at optimal capacity, measure the ecommerce KPI and use the ratios as targets. A secondary option is to back into these ecommerce KPI ratios. This can be achieved by setting the ideal or needed web revenue, identify all the segments that make up traffic (such as direct load, search engines, email marketing, etc), identify the conversion rates for each traffic segment, project the volume of traffic it would take to generate the desired revenue based off of known conversion rates, and then work out each Targeted eCommerce KPI based on this ideal traffic projection. When making projections, it is better to sandbag results, rather than being overtly optimistic. Set realistic goals, that can then be matched under known conversion rates. Thus the focus shifts to increasing traffic for the known segments, while potentially adding new tactics to the online marketing mix.

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How to Sell Online if You Already Have a Physical Store

Small brick-and-mortar retailers can find new customers, experiment with new products, and generally grow their business when they start selling online. For established retailers, the first steps toward ecommerce often begin with product preparation, software selection and integration, and learning about online marketing and customer service.

Ecommerce is a fast expanding retail segment, growing 20 percent in the United States in the first quarter of 2013. Based on estimates from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the IBM Online Retail Index, total ecommerce sales excluding travel and automobiles may have been as much as $50 billion in the first quarter.

Find out more at http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/4065-How-to-Sell-Online-if-You-Already-Have-a-Physical-Store

7 essentials for defending against DDoS attacks

You don't have to be a bank to be worried about being hit by a Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack these days. With hackers who pull off these costly take downs getting stealthier and more vicious, security leaders across all industries need heed these tips to be prepared

Security execs have never been comfortable talking about these attacks because they don't want to draw more attention to their companies. They worry that offering even the basic details of their defensive strategy will inspire attackers to find the holes.

But many companies are finding themselves under attack for the first time, and their security chiefs need answers if they're going to fight back.

• Tight lips sink company defenses
• Be ready for real-time defense adjustments
• Don't rely only on perimeter defenses
• Fight application-layer attacks in-line
• Collaborate
• Have your playbook ready
• Watch out for secondary attacks
• Be worried, even if you're not a bank

Why not checkout http://www.csoonline.com/article/734936/7-essentials-for-defending-against-ddos-attacks for the full article.