As margins tighten for online retailers, getting consumers to re-engage with abandoned shopping carts could be the difference between profits and losses.
According to a 2010 Experian CheetahMail benchmark study, online shopping carts are abandoned at a rate of 56.2 percent. Furthermore, 61.2 percent of all items placed in carts are left behind without purchase.
“If you’re running a multimillion or multibillion dollar company, that’s a lot of money to leave on the table,” says Bernardine Wu, CEO of e-commerce consultancy firm FitForCommerce. That’s why the likes of Walmart, Overstock.com and Nordstrom send their registered customers e-mail reminders about the items they left in their shopping carts.
Wu says flatly that any retailer not sending abandoned cart e-mails is behind the times. “This is no longer a nice to have — it’s becoming a must have,” she says.