Deep Dive: Preventing Shopping Cart Abandonment

[00:00:00] Hello friends, it's Todd and I am currently out of the country on vacation.

[00:00:04] I'll be back Thursday, February 29th.

[00:00:07] So instead of a regular newscast type show, please enjoy this deep dive interview.

[00:00:13] On the e-commerce space, there's no end to the number of plugins, platforms, and pop-ups

[00:00:18] you can install on your store's web front to try to juice sales.

[00:00:22] One of the biggest focuses of this just so different than the real world. If you think about last time you went grocery

[00:01:40] shopping or even retail shopping, it's very see your total price after taxes and tip and shipping and all of these kind of bizarre fees that a lot of companies now are adding on to transactions. Sometimes it's just quite simply an organizational motivation, right? That people are getting a wish list in order

[00:03:00] or getting some ideas put together

[00:03:04] and putting things in their basket that particularly, Again, we're only speculating because this is clickstream data. Now, the beauty of clickstream data is we're measuring actual behaviors. We know where eyeballs were, we know where people were clicking throughout the purchase funnel. What we don't know though is that why? So again, please note that whatever findings we have,

[00:04:21] when I go to explain why they held or why they didn't,

[00:04:24] I'm merely speculating because I don't have data to mix this up between hedonic or, you know, fun purchases, or utilitarian or kind of more, I guess, boring purchases, right? I would love to get data on that to split that up to see because I really do think that

[00:05:40] your question, I think it matters what type of product.

[00:05:43] And I wish I had data to we need to think long and hard as marketers of providing extra things, extra pages,

[00:07:02] because that only gives one more chance for somebody

[00:07:05] to click here, click here has gone through, you know, quite a hard time

[00:08:20] with the pandemic.

[00:08:22] For e-commerce marketers, the silver lining to buy it from somebody if they're in that mindset already. So again, and I don't have the data for this, a lot of times it depends on somebody's mindset

[00:09:40] going in.

[00:09:41] And this is where the data has some limitations.

[00:09:43] But if somebody is in that mindset and it You end up on a website, you put one thing in a basket, you leave the website, and then like eight seconds later, you get an email from the company saying, come back, come back. How soon should we be retargeting people

[00:11:00] when they've left something in a cart?

[00:11:02] God, I wish I could talk about my team's research

[00:11:05] right now on this, but we can't do it too soon because it's too pushy. But you also can't do it too late, right? Because if we do this too late, then maybe somebody else, to my earlier point, they've moved on, especially if it's a utilitarian product. I'll give you a crazy example. You know, my kids are to capture were things like, did they have an existing cart? In other words, when they opened up their session, was the item from the last session already there or not? We looked at the number of sold out products that they were exposed to. We looked at the number of clearance pages

[00:13:42] that they were, again, exposed to.

[00:13:43] I can't assume that they read it.

[00:13:46] That's a limitation of this data. between shopping on a desktop versus a more mobile device. And we think that, again, has to do with a convenience motivation. Maybe when we're shopping on our phone, maybe we don't have that mindset of purchasing as much. Maybe people take things a little bit more serious when they're shopping from a PC.

[00:15:01] Now, what could be confounded with that

[00:15:03] and data that I don't have or our team doesn't have

[00:15:06] is where are people shopping from? yours specifically, but just sort of general marketing research into this space knows that there is some level of device switching. But I was interested to note that this device switching, at least the numbers that you found, it wasn't nearly as big a thing as I think most people in the industry think it is. You found I think 98% of smartphone users never switched to desktop or any other device

[00:16:20] during or between sessions.

[00:16:21] Yeah.

[00:16:22] Did that surprise you?

[00:16:23] It did.

[00:16:24] But just like you, it's such a buzz's not, maybe it's smart, right? It's all depending how you perceive this and of course if you're the marketer or if you're the consumer and as I'm a consumer and a marketer I think I'm're looking at would be things like clothing, footwear, sporting goods, sporting apparel, homeware, which probably aren't huge ticket items.

[00:19:00] I think if you look at the average cart size of things

[00:19:04] that were completed with this data set, team and I would like to do, or at least I would like to do, or encourage my peers or someone in industry to do, would be to replicate our work, but also dig deeper into the actual type of things that are bought, big ticket versus a t-shirt or something,

[00:20:20] and see if device switching plays a bigger role.

[00:20:23] Because if you read our data and our findings, today at Miro.com slash podcast. That's three free boards at MIRO.com slash podcast. Miro.com slash podcast. Every day, we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At US Border

[00:21:41] Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. And my friend Jen said, what, what, what are you taking the things for? She said, well, I'm just going to go buy them on Amazon. Like right to the face of the purse of the bookseller. You know, it's it is getting kind of shameless in that way. Exactly. And maybe, maybe shameless is a bad word.

[00:23:00] In fact, I like almost want to retract to that when I said, I was like, oh, dear, I'm

[00:23:03] not calling consumer shameless. Questionable people don't know is this appropriate and maybe it's because they're not thinking from it from the businesses point of view They're thinking rightly so from their point of view Hey If I can save you know five bucks ordering this book on on eBay or Amazon instead of buying it from the author Who's like sitting right there? Maybe people don't understand that that is on that gray area of etiquette these days who knows

[00:25:27] log on to the second you close the browser or the app in that in some cases. So if we had long-term data I think the question would be have a different

[00:25:34] answer than the way that I can answer it within that shorter window because based

[00:25:41] on our research on the long the big get it for your kids. I think continuously pasture so you want to put it on this list okay this will be for a christmas or this will be for their birthday or this will be for their next big milestone whatever that is so i do think that there's a lot of good to use wish list. I'm but one kind of caveat to this and i think amazon has really mastered this and it's good and it's bad for us as parents and consumers in general is the whole buy it now feature.

[00:28:06] cookie pocalypse and the removal of cross site tracking would affect your ability,

[00:28:09] researchers ability to collect this kind of data. Like, are we not only entering a time where it's going to be difficult for us

[00:28:13] to measure ad campaigns as marketers, but are we entering a time where this

[00:28:16] removal of cross site tracking, the removal of third party cookies,

[00:28:20] the enhanced privacy is going to contribute to a loss in the research

[00:28:26] community of what marketing science can offer practitioners?

[00:29:27] point, the more of these restrictions, the less we as researchers can really answer some of these very minuscule, like detailed questions such as what percentage of customers started

[00:29:34] with a tablet and then they went to their desktop. Right now we could answer that.

[00:29:39] Yeah.

[00:29:40] But in the future, sometimes we're not going to be able to do this.

[00:29:45] What surprised you the most about your findings? when a customer has 30 items and they put it in their cart and they are, you know, going to remove 29 of them, how is that different than the customer who's just putting one thing in and then they don't finish that transaction? So I think there's still room to address those two topics because to me anyway those were a

[00:31:03] little bit fuzzy compared to the other ones which were much more clear in terms And then that could spark something called choice deferral. Again, kind of putting it off. Planned procrastination was an earlier word that we had used for that. So what customers can do and what companies can do is really think about those customer reviews and where they're gonna be on that site

[00:32:22] and if they're needed at all,

[00:32:23] because if it produces information overload,