Cart abandonment? Who needs a cart! Recover lost revenue NOW.

Do you own an e-commerce website and lament the hundreds (or thousands) of shopping carts that your potential customers have filled... and then left abandoned, blocking the virtual isles of your online store? The solution is easier than you think, and it won't cost you a cent.

Regular readers of the Wiliam blog will have noticed that cart abandonment has been a trending topic over the past 12 months, give or take. There's a good reason for this, and there's nothing I like better than a good yarn about how we've managed to turn around the fortunes of one of our awesome clients. And so this story begins with one of my favourite projects - Access Prepaid - who have recently taken up with Rejoiner, seeing fantastic results that are definitely worth sharing.

We integrated the Rejoiner tracking code onto numerous prepaid currency card conversion funnels (card purchase and top-up). Rejoiner comes into play the moment the user hits 'step 2' of the funnel - once we have collected their email address on step1. This allows us to re-target the potential customer, triggered through further tracking to see whether or not additional tracking was fired via this user successfully reaching the 'order complete' page. Any user who didn't reach the confirmation page is then sent an email (and optional offer/incentive) at a configurable time (hours / minutes) after they partially placed the currency order.

So far, there's nothing obvioulsy unique about this integration - it's easy, simple stuff. What makes it awesome are two things.

1) Immediate success

When it comes to integrating third party services (such as CrazyEgg, MailChimp, etc.) I've always found the inevitable ongoing costs - such as monthly or annual licensing fees - are one of the biggest pain points for clients to overcome. The best thing about Rejoiner - and the main reason why you shouldn't delay trying it out - is that you don't start paying for it until you've actually had your first order recovered.

For Access Prepaid, this came within hours of integrating the tracking code - an order was recovered to the value of $7,000 AUD - with profit large enough to cover the expense of Rejoiner for the next 8 months! Notably, this was an expense the client wouldn't have incurred unless Rejoiner had been successful in the first place. Hence, the billing model offered by Rejoiner, it's essentially risk free.

One month in, and Rejoiner has reportedly recovered in excess of $70,000 in orders that would otherwise had been lost.

Our client is happy to be raking in lost revenue, and their customers are happy to be incentivised just a little more to complete their order. And Wiliam pulls off another successful integration. Everyone is a winner :)

2) No shopping cart!

There is one interesting, key difference between Cash Passport and most other e-commerce websites... no shopping cart!

I hear you - how does one recover the sale from a lost cart if there was never a cart in the first place? Well, the reality of this situation is that the selection of foreign currencies (to be purchased) is made early on in the order/top-up funnel. Effectively, you compile your order items in what would traditionally simply be the checkout. If the user leaves the funnel, there is no 'cart' for these currencies to remain within, and the site does not maintain any session state or cookies to keep track of the data.

This is unlike a regular e-commerce website where the user first browses categories and products, selecting a quantity and adding to the cart (the 'checkout' process comes after the user has finished browsing products). And generally the cart sits there, stored against the user account within a cookie or database.

So it's interesting that we've still had outstanding results with Rejoiner even though technically we are not rescuing an 'abandoned cart'. The user is required to complete the order from scratch, re-keying their currency amounts, personal and payment details (if they got that far in the first place). In one sense, it proves that rejoiner can be used to remind or incentivise a user to return and complete ANY multi-step conversion funnel, and is not restrained to just being used for abandoned shopping carts.

Why Rejoiner?

Rejoiner is one of numerous cart abandonment solutions available, and the main reasons we chose to run with these guys were:

• Payment structure being virtually risk free, and also relatively low cost compared to similar providers. You're paying for the service out of the revenue that you would have otherwise have never seen (lost), which essentially validates the claim that only good things can come from this!
• The dashboard and reporting was able to be shown in currencies outside of USD (not all cart abandonment solutions offer to show recovered order value in the websites' local currency).
• Integration was a breeze - literally about 30min from sign-up to copy/pasting the tracking code

The real question here is, why NOT Rejoiner?!

Seriously, I was quite surprised at how few of our clients had actually integrated a cart abandonment email solution, after all the heavy spruiking we'd been doing at Wiliam. There is no reason to be sceptical of this technology, you'd almost have to be mad to not to integrate, once you knew the benefits and how easy and pain-free the integration is. Our clients should be banging down the door, begging for this kind of add-on!

One client, recovering $70,000 in otherwise lost revenue in the first month... effectively for free. Seriously, call your Wiliam producer today!!