good post

It is interesting to note that shopping carts in the offline world are abandoned AFTER the goods have been purchased!

out: http://www.docchallenge.org/Art/city-of-lost- carts.html. 12

I have worked a lot on finding ways to protect my customers from thinking about abandoning carts. One simple thing I have done is to implement a page which takes up their contact information and complete order details before they go to the payment page. By doing this, when any of my customers do not pay on payment page, an email is automatically sent to them offering them a direct link to their cart, which they can again checkout within no time.

I find that very effective tool, and most of the missed leads convert to sales after I have implemented this.

1) treat the last page they are on your site as the Conversion Point (I’m using Persuasion Architecture terminology for this; you can easily look up definitions for this online). The entire scenario you’d be measuring for the customer would end at this point
2) treat the page that customers come back to your site from PayPal as the start of a new scenario (it’ll be short, naturally)
3) measure the two separately and make an assumption (albeit not a half-bad one when the alternative is no measurement at all) that in the aggregate a specific customer acts like a typical customer and therefore how people complete the scenario in (1) above *on average* will correspond to how people complete the scenario in (2) above *on average*.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start

Now, if you have access to a medium skilled programmer what I’d also strongly suggest is that on the final step of (1) you set a specific cookie, separate from any other cookies you’re using on the site. Perhaps call it the “paypal” cookie All it needs to contain is some sort of unique ID for the transaction — you don’t have to link it directly to “Mary Smith’s” transaction but you do need to give Mary Smith a unique value for this cookie. For illustration purposes let’s give it a value “123-ABC” – obviosuly something unique will have a lot more characters in it.
Again it is to identify this transaction specifically not Mary Smith generally.

Then, at the start of scenario (2), read the cookie, and embed it into this second scenario. That way you’ll be able to go back with your analytics program and match these two scenarios together. (one too simple way might be to just throw the value of the cookie onto the URL and then let Google Analytics look for similar URL values to unite the two click paths).

Again, this too isn’t perfect, but the act of doing it will unveil new ideas and thoughts to you for how to better measure this. And hopefully you’ll get a bit of a conversion tweak, enough to pay to transition off the PayPal system

Mine is a small but niche website. I am using Paypal Shopping cart, which takes users away from website when they click BUY NOW or ADD TO CART. I am not sure how I can track how many people abandon the shopping cart, as they leave website once they click BUY NOW.

Great post- and I’ve got a question for you. What do you think is the percentage of shopping carts that are abandoned because of the ‘trust’ factor- versus the percentage of carts that are abandoned simply because that’s how the customer is figuring out information?

For instance, I’ve abandoned more than one cart not because I didn’t trust the vendor, but because:
- it was the only way I could figure out the shipping charges/options.
- it was the equivalent of picking an item up in a store and considering: “Do I really want this?” The sales page didn’t give me a way to just contemplate the whole thing at once.
- pyschological factors related to the above, where I just wanted to see what it was like to maybe purchase it, and then decided I didn’t need it.

In those instances, there is very little the vendor could’ve done to keep me from abandoning the cart. But, they could’ve created a situation where I had what I needed -before- I got into the shopping cart. And it would’ve left me with a more pleasant experience.

Anyway- interested in your thoughts on this, if you care to share.