How Many Customers Would You Like To Lose Online: Analyzing Your Shopping Cart Abandonment
In a traditional retail store you can assign greeters are the door (hello and welcome to CVS, Gap, Wal-Mart) to greet customers and say "thanks for shopping" when they leave.
However online there are few mechanisms in place to do this. Of course you can trigger a chat window to pop up after X seconds, but there are few other tools. Having GREAT navigation is one way to ensure customers visit your site, return and shop a lot.
According to SeeWhy, statistics demonstrate that only 17 percent of companies follow up on website abandonment at all and only 9 percent within 24 hours. These stats also show that people abandon their online shopping carts 50% of the time. Clearly there is something wrong and clearly a lot of money is being left on the proverbial table.
“Website abandonment is a persistent problem that affects every website,” said Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy. “Up to 70 percent of shopping carts, registrations, quotes and online forms are abandoned before they’re complete. Companies need to consider complementing their traditional web analytics with follow-up actions to maintain revenue from consumers while your website is still fresh in their minds.”
SeeWhy, a company specializing in abandonment tracking software, has launched a free tool, Abandonment Tracker Free, to help you see how many customers (and which ones) are abanding your forms, shoppping carts and etc. Like many "free" tools, there is a paid version that SeeWhy wants you to upgrade to, but give this free tool a spin and see what you learn. It doe quite a bit.
According to SeeWhy, setting up Abandonment Tracker Free is fast and easy. In short, Abandonment Tracker Free captures the unique IDs of website abandoners, emailing those IDs to the website operator for use in follow-up, re-marketing campaigns targeted to the individual abandoners. Users sign up on the SeeWhy website, and then copy their unique SeeWhy page tag onto their site, which usually takes less than 20 minutes. Within 24 hours, the Abandonment Tracker Free service is live for that site.
When a visitor lands on a web page in the conversion funnel, an event is sent to SeeWhy’s secure data center. If the visitor doesn’t convert, SeeWhy records the abandonment along with the details, including email address, shopping cart items and amount, and stage in the conversion process at which the visitor abandoned.
