I’m a visual person. I like to imagine scenes like a movie director might. It helps to put data into perspective. So imagine this.
You are walking around your local supermarket or electronics store. You have been putting things into the trolley, things you want, things you need. You put them into your basket because at the Zero Moment of Truth, you made an assesment that the product satisfied your needs and it was a good price to pay for the benefit it would bring you.
You wheel the trolley towards the checkout, stand in the line and look around – there are lines of trolleys, filled with product, left abandoned. 77% of the people who, just like you, added products to their basket because they wanted them, and were prepared to pay for them, just left them… and walked out of the shop.
In the Ecommerce world, they call this an abandoned cart. Cart, trolley, basket – it’s all the same thing – People who leave their basket empty at the checkout, but in an online world are invisible.
New numbers about online shopping by SaleCycle are more shocking when you picture it in the ‘real world’.
- Global cart abandonment rate is 76.8%. Why?
- Fashion boasts the lowest cart abandonment rate of any industry at 67.4% – to me, this seems counter-intuitive, but perhaps it is because returns are higher for fashion.
- Remarketing emails have a 28.2% conversion from a click. Which means some people DID actually want to complete the purchase, but for some reason didn’t.
Let’s put the last bullet point through the Hollywood scene lens… imagine –
The customer fills the basket, wheels it with wobbly left back right wheel towards the checkout. Something happens – a phone call from her daughter’s school – the customer leaves the cart in the line, does not pay and pushes past the other customers to leave the store. The phone call is not an emergency. In a hurry and distracted, she is tapped on the shoulder by a smiling face. “You left your basket at the checkout, did you really want to do that?” She didn’t. She walks back into the store, gives over her credit card and buys the products that she originally chose.
If you had a store, and someone left a basket at the checkout and walked out, you would tap them on the shoulder and ask them why. If 3/4 of your customers did it, you would be alarmed!
The technology exists to tap these customers on the shoulder. Whether it be Dotmailer, Emarsys or Hotjar – there is a way to reconnect.
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