Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

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At ConversionVoodoo we've found that the gains pulled out of cart-work are staggering vs. other areas in your funnel - 50%+ improvements to be had even on high volume / "well optimized" projects (10k+ sales/mo).

Three easy places to start:

a) Simplify the UI - Make it as simple as possible for people to enter their payment details - large fonts, cross-browser tested, minimal pages, optimized for the lowest screen resolution of your average user on up.

b) Reiterate TRUST messaging - testimonials or buying popular symbols (Verign /McAfee / etc) and even dialing in the PLACEMENT of those logos is high-value eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen...

e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order, calling dropped carts, or hitting a pop-up of live help or similar is easy money.

Add to this all the usual - proper messaging on buttons, lightning fast response times, mobile optimized version too, etc and you instantly gain a massive advantage over your competitors.

We have got numerous case studies on the checkout page http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php

Some of the common tactics that have worked for our customers:

- Providing a summary of what they have ordered and making sure there are no hidden surprises (extra taxes or shipping charges)

- Adding trust indicators like Verisign seal (yes, they really work!)

- Not requiring them to create an account just to checkout

- Adding phone number and physical address that customers can reach out in case they need help

- Good looking design (people subconsciously associate good design with higher trust. If you have an odd color, or a grammatical mistake, or a dangling element, it tells how careless you are at designing the most critical page, so you would be careless with their money as well)

Wow, I am not a target customer for modern e-commerce. I would never return to a store that had behaviors like this:

> e) Implement a Cart Abandon strategy - either sending "instant discounts" via email good for 24hrs to complete order,

Training users to haggle at checkout and not trust the list prices

> calling dropped carts.

harassing people offline after they leave your store?

> or hitting a pop-up of live help

Does anyone believe in live help? All I ever see it do it block content I am trying to read, providing the equivalent of menu-driven CLI (the scripts agents follow) when I already have a powerful GUI in front of me.

patio11 and other wise people have said this much better than me, but here goes: you are not like most people. You are likely to be a hacker, engineer or at least a computer power user. Most people are not. These techniques will work and print money with these other people which are not like you, and they are the majority.

patio11 and other wise people have said this much better than me, but here goes: you are not like most people.

After realizing this, one must then get over the idea that accepting money from such people is unethical.

Why is it unethical?

Many people are nervous - even scared - when purchasing online, because of the numerous stories of "having stuff hacked".

Live help lets them know there's a human being at the end of the line.

Abandoned carts are often a manifestation of that fear - so again, contacting them afterwards lets them know that there's a real person there.

And many people like the idea of something but when it comes to the actual commitment get cold feet - discounts can help in that case.

I didn't say it is unethical, just implied that it's possible to have the idea that it's unethical. Maybe accepting money from less technologically capable people feels like unfair manipulation to some. Maybe the idea was planted as unwitting sabotage by intimidated, less technologically capable people trying to counteract a feeling of inferiority.

Live help drives conversions on our ecommerce site. Our customers ask questions more often than I would expect.

Cart abandonment coupons haven't worked for us at all. My thinking is that our 10% discount isn't steep enough but I have no data. Since I don't have any insight in to what people do after they abandon the cart I'm not sure throwing discounts at them is an effective strategy.

Calling dropped carts? That's not something we have the bandwidth to do.

Through a lot of experimentation. I've found out that you need to offer at least 40% to get any significant conversion of the cart dropouts. At least for the shareware desktop software I sell.

> Training users to haggle at checkout and not trust the list prices

Definitely, this is quite a risky one. Just speaking for myself if I notice a Cart Abandon strategy, I will always abandon my cart in the future to keep getting the dicsount.

Firstly, the merchant still gets the sale and is happy (it's like boasting about getting 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond). All the merchant has to do is skip an email here and there (if they want). This is to say: you have not found a loophole; you are not a concern to the merchant; no one should be frightened by this tactic because of your story.

> Firstly, the merchant still gets the sale and is happy (it's like boasting about getting 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond).

True, but they would have gotten more money had they held their ground. I was still going to buy the item, sometimes I abandon the cart accidentally because I got distracted.

However if you shove a discount in my face assuming I'm about to walk, I'm going to use it even if I was just about to pay full price without hesitation.

> This is to say: you have not found a loophole; you are not a concern to the merchant; no one should be frightened by this tactic because of your story.

Assuming the 15%-20% is all extra markup, this is true. Also it's not "my story" for the record. Sites like retailmenot index cart abandon strategies. Way more people are going to use that discount than just those you intend. If that's an acceptable loss, then great.

It's still not necessarily a great idea depending on your business.

>It's still not necessarily a great idea depending on your business.

But that's the whole point of A/B testing, rather than argue of hours based on intuition and anecdote you can actually test these ideas. No need for debate here, just run experiment and look at the results.

It's not so easy to run correct A/B test in that case. At a minimum you should measure long-term impact of emailing discount to users who abandoned shopping card. That means at least couple of months testing.

Note that debate is still needed in order to properly setup A/B test.

While I agree with what your saying in regards to not reasoning about the larger situation. Initial A/B testing should just be to get a sense of the magnitude of increase (if any) in conversion rates when you do the discount.

Only then can you reasonably discuss the issues presented. If your results say 'this is definitely a good idea for increasing purchases', then rather than do long term A/B tests it would be better to just monitor overall trends in potential abuse.

So there are really two separate issues: Do discount follow ups to abandoned carts create a large increase in purchases. This is easily answered with an A/B test

Are people likely to abuse this discount system? And how do we stop it if they do? This is hard to test with a simple A/B test and is much better answered just by monitoring the purchases and looking at the extreme cases. Also this is pretty easily solved by just adding limits to when the system grants discounts.

> True, but they would have gotten more money had they held their ground. I was still going to buy the item, sometimes I abandon the cart accidentally because I got distracted.

This is one of the very things they are trying to fight.

It's a numbers game, and the money form extra sales might very well make up for a few sneaky users abusing it.

Just a bit of anecdata: I believe in Live Help. (And Harvey Dent, but that's not important right now.)

I can think of at least two occasions where having a Live Help function available on a site made the difference between me buying something and not buying it. One of those things (a sit-stand desk) was quite expensive.

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