Why bother with Cart Abandonment at all
Setting up cart abandonment emails are an essential part of running an E-commerce business in 2018. Cart abandonment refers to customers who browse your store, find items they like, add them to their cart, and then disappear never to return.
A percentage of these customers intended to check out and spend money at your store. (A percentage didn’t. They were price matching, checking your shipping prices, window shopping… These are optimisations for another day).
What to look for in a cart abandonment service
A cart abandonment solution will reach out to these customers and gently remind them that they’ve navigated through your store, to the checkout, and left the site. A good solution will offer them the chance to tap a link and resume their experience, no matter the device. Make sure you add this to your wish-list — not all cart abandonment solutions do this!
Cart Catch sends timed, well presented emails to your customers with a list of product photos and titles that they added to their cart, making it clear to the customer that it’s super simple to finish the process.
We use email outreach because it’s also the perfect time to check in with the customer and see if they had any issues. Was shipping too expensive? Do you not ship to their country? Is there problems using your payment gateways? These are all issues that affect conversions and lose sales to your store.
If it’s as easy as hitting ‘reply’ in their email, the user can reach out and quickly let you know that ‘shipping to Canada is too expensive :(‘
Hosting considerations
If possible, keep ancillary services primarily hosted outside of your core business. As an e-commerce business grows, complex components are better served by third parties to ensure proper care is paid to uptime, reliability, updates and security.
See mailchimp for marketing, sendgrid for emails, xero for accounting, etc. These services are all best kept *out* of the pipeline of your paying customers. This means you won’t need to scale your server to keep it beefy enough to run scheduled tasks that run thousands of times per day, and potential downtime/upgrades/issues on either side won’t affect the other.
If you have an influx of customers for a black friday sale, it shouldn’t affect your cart abandonment processing (in the same way as it shouldn’t affect your accounting package!)
How much are cart abandonment services?
Since cart abandonment can make a real difference to your store revenues, many services like to charge a sliding commission of 0.5-2% of your sales. Since many online stores run on super thin margins already, this can represent 10-30% of your real net profit. Tread carefully with services that charge a sliding commission.
Others charge a flat up-front or monthly fee, which seems far more reasonable and allows you to keep growing without a constant monthly tax on your overheads. It’s not a super intensive platform to run, so keep an eye on the costs.
Ours (Cart Catch) is completely free for the core functionality that you need to recover abandoned carts. We’ll keep you in the loop when we add some extra paid features down the track.
Ease of Setup
Look around for something that allows you to get up and running super fast, so you don’t need to spend too long messing about with re-designs, configuring convoluted accounts and guessing at the best times/timings to get results.
It’s tricky to get all the details right to reduce cart abandonment, so try to use something that’s set up well out of the box. For Cart Catch, we preconfigure a campaign with 3 emails to go out to confirmed abandoned cart customers. We use your store name, logo and colours. All you need to do is drop in a configuration key and go.
It’s all configurable of course, but we think it’s easier not to.