Contacting Customers About Abandoned Basket

Do you do it, and does it work?

[graywolf]

Does anyone contact a customer via email if they have an abandoned basket? If you do, do thet complete it? Would you be bothered if you were contacted, or we asked you why you abandoned the basket?

[Perplexed]

I think it would have to be very carefully worded for me to answer it or not be annoyed.

How would you have captured their email if the basket was abandoned?

[Staffa]

Adding to what Perplexed already mentioned, on many sites you have to go the shopping cart to know what the price is, VERY annoying.

[graywolf]

We have a one page where you enter the information and one where you review it before completing the transaction. If you had a cart that you didn't complete after 5 days and you had an email I would send you a reminder.

something like

John Smith, this is a reminder from www.widgets.com that you have an open shopping cart with us. You can complete this transaction any time before xx/xx/xxxx by using the link below. If you encountered a technical problem please let us know.

www.widgets.com/basket

[wackal]

sounds a little bit like high pressure sales. Imagine if you were leaving Walmart after just looking around and having someone asking you why you didn't buy something.

[2_much]

I think all you can do for this is add one of those surveys, offering them an incentive if they fill it out. Any other way would be intrusive and might be resented by the "would be" customers.

Instead of asking your customers, couldn't you tweak the cart until you see the "abandonment" numbers reduce?

[PCInk]

"How do you capture their email address?"

The customer has typed it in. I had good success contacting customers after a site update when customers had tried to place an order. My email went along the lines of:

We notice that you have tried to orders some items from our online store, however we do not appear to have had a payment for these goods. If you still require these items please follow the link below:
<link>
If there was a problem or technical issue when placing your order, please let us know because the shopping site is in late stages of development.

It was surprising the number that responded, but more importantly, no-one seemed to mind as it was a no-pressure email. It was only ever sent to customers who did not enter a credit card number at all (card failures were ignored) and who entered full personal details (i.e. we never sent it back to someone with the telephone number 77777777 or the address 123 anywhere street, only orders that looked completely valid.

[mack]

I think this could work if it was worded properly. For example...

Hi xxxxx. We noticed from our records that you did not finish your shopping on our website on the (date), Was there a problem with our site that prevented you from making the purchase?

Thanks for visiting our site,
your name
contact email address
domain.com

[graywolf]

Mack your version is much better than mine, thanks.

[aaronjf]

I think all you can do for this is add one of those surveys, offering them an incentive if they fill it out. Any other way would be intrusive and might be resented by the "would be" customers.

Instead of asking your customers, couldn't you tweak the cart until you see the "abandonment" numbers reduce?

2_much, could you expand on the survey and incentive idea. I like the idea I am just a little cloudy on how you would implement that and get people to actually participate.

[Mark_A]

graywolf I think your idea is a good one in principle because you can often learn a lot more about how to improve something from those that did not choose to use you than from those that did.

why did the people who dumped you .. do that .... what might you need to change to make it better for them ...

people who are using you are obviously satisfied enough to use you but that does not mean that they are ...

- much of the market
- demanding customers
- could not be more happy if you improved things more

I guess the only issue is that in trying to find out and make your offering better to try to keep more of the present leaving users .. you have to ensure you do not alienate existing ones.

Thats got to be the critical thing ... & in a past reincarnation it became the main challenge .. how to ensure we kept all our existing repeat customers and did enough to win some more on a regular basis ...

One is just no good without the other - you need both to thrive :-)

I would keep the communication low key and work to avoid any suggestion of pressure selling as that, after I already abandonned your cart would drive me up the wall certainly.

A genuine request for information would I think be fine.

If that irritates some .. what the heck, they already abandonned you :-) perhaps 5 responses might give you the info that you need to improve that measure for the future.

[mack]

For god's sake! get back on the site and finish your purchase, or we will send the boys round for a quite chat over a game of baseball!

That should do it!

Mack.

[workinghard]

Hi - Like some others, people get the chance to review their order etc before paying. If they got to the stage of entering their details but then left without paying I always follow up. I convert about 30% of those orders. I use the email below

Hi

Thank you for visiting - our website address

I noticed you tried to place an order with us. For some reason the order was not processed successfully. If you still wish to order the (items) you will need to place the order again. If it’s easier you could order by phone on (phone number).

If you experienced any problems please be kind enough to let me know so that they can be corrected.

Many thanks
Alan
website address.

[Hawkgirl]

We tried it and it really ticked people off. They felt it was very intrusive and made it very clear to us that they'd never be back to use our site again.

I'd tread very lightly around this idea. :)

[Perplexed]

Since I wrote my first answer to this ( msg#2 )I have had an interesting thing happen.

I tried to buy some stuff for the wife off a site the other night and when I got to the part requiring credit card details the page would not open. I tried repeatedly then swore at the site and gave up.

Later that night I tried to get something for myself and the same thing happened. Two dead sites in a night was to much so I started fiddling around and tracked the problem down to a very slight tweak I had given to IE's privacy settings. that had stopped the secure page opening.....

So maybe, on reflection, a pleasant letter asking if I had encountered a problem wouldn't have ruffled my feathers. Workinghard's offering above would have been most acceptable.

It might be worth remembering that not all abandoned carts are done intentionally.

[derekwong28]

We used to asked customers who abandoned carts whether there were any technical problems, and 20% will convert. Some people do get problems with Worldpay. What we did then was to use an escrow service. However, since i-escrow and escrow.ca went out of business, we no longer do this.

[rogerd]

I think I might try this as a brief sampling now and then to check for problems and trends, but I'd be leery of implementing it 100%. I think it would be kind of spooky, like a LiveChat person asking, "Can I help you?" while I'm browsing a site.

I abandon lots of carts. I'll start one to see what the product price is, or shipping, etc. If I found a malfunction when ordering something I wanted, I'd tend to report it to the site. Not everyone will, but in my experience you'll learn about order entry problems from proactive customers.

[MonkeeSage]

I would tend to see it as a smart idea from the business end for a few reasons, most of which have already been mentioned:

- Feedback on what is broken / unappealing
- Makes a more personal connection w/ the customer (sometimes), or at least shows that you are actively concerned with the QoS of the site
- Might even cause them to rethink their initial rethinking and go ahead with the order

And from the user end, at most they will ignore the mail and think to themselves 'if I wanted to buy it I would have done so'. But I don't think anyone would be offended by the gesture, or that it would keep anyone from shopping with you again.

My two bananas worth. :)

Jordan

[Wild_Cujo]

We found that a large # of our dumped carts were due to 2 things:
1) some products you have to place in the basket to see the price.
- I know someone said that was annoying and I agree 100% but the manufacture will not allow us to show our price sinc it is lower than some odd dollar amount until we have "set up a relationship with the customer"

2) shipping costs
- by far a huge lose of baskets were b/c of high shipping cost for low priced items like resistors and what not.

[aaronjf]

You would be surprised how many people do not report problems. For instance, after a particular intern had been working for me for about a month I felt they were ready to tackle some more complex projects. I gave the kid a template and said ok, you know how to make pages form the template, and now you know how to set up the cart for a product. Here is a site that is just a skeleton, here are all the product numbers, literature, prices, etc for the products that will flesh out the site. The kid went through and just started making up product numbers. So the carts were all broken - 300+. A month later, after I fired the kid for something else, I started wondering why the site was getting traffic, but not selling a thing. So tested a few of the carts and found that they did not work. After further inspection found that not one single one worked. Then I went into the cart and saw that people had been abandoning the cart left and right. However, none bothered to contact us and say they were having trouble. They just left the site and bought somewhere else.

[aaronjf]

2) shipping costs
- by far a huge lose of baskets were b/c of high shipping cost for low priced items like resistors and what not.

A friend of mine beat this problem by having a cart that tells you the shipping amount in a little box "cart summary" on every page. After the first item is added to a cart a customer is asked to sign in or choose there shipping prefs and enter location. There is a message saying that this is so we can give you and running shipping price as you add to the basket. Seems to work like a charm for him. We are updating our cart system and including this feature in November.

[antirack]

I like this topic, as I had a similar test running two years back.

We have abandoned shopping carts because people have to create an account in order to see shipping costs (we sell 100% international because we are at a very special location).

Another reason is that people can choose "other" payment methods, which means they'll get an email with payment info like Western Union accounts, bank accounts whatsoever.

What I have tried is to contact those customers after X days, offering them free shipping (only if the shipping was under Y% of the total purchase volume). This was only done for first time customers.

This worked out very well, if I am not wrong. It was considered as a test for further tweaking, and since then it's on my todo list for years to get this back running, but on a better scale.

Now the big question: when should we contact customers? Next day, 2 days later, 5 days later?