How To Recover the 97% Of Carts Abandoned In Mobile Shopping Apps | Hacker News Reader

How To Recover the 97% Of Carts Abandoned In Mobile Shopping Apps

forbes.com

21 pointskunle21 comments

So will the % of abandoned carts increase when people discover they can earn extra perks by always dropping the order?

Agreed, giving a discount or other reward for recovering an abandoned cart is a VERY dangerous road to go down IMO.

I am not sure I agree. Many major online retailers do this and are very successful. Promotions can be site-wide or category sales, individual items, certain brands, offering mail-in-rebates, etc.

Done right, it is wildly successful.

Depends on your business and the core reason why carts are abandoned. This example was just demonstrating what a business could potentially do with push notifications; most businesses already do similar things on the web, to reasonable success.

Always nice to see a fresh term for “spamming your potential customers”.

Some sites force you to add an item to the cart in order to see the price -- I can understand how 97% are abandoned if these are included.

Agreed - bad practice. Not advocating that in the least.

I'm sorry for such an awful (but accurate) pun, but this seems like a bit of a pushy sales tactic. I personally run away from businesses that use tactics such as these.

Please, don't do what this article suggests.

AKA How to get users to deny your application's request to send push notifications.

I installed the Gilt app mentioned in the article. Push notifications and emails almost everyday.

This is exactly how you get me to deny the request for push notifications.

This will be true until the end of time: be useful to your customer, not spammy.

Understood - for flash sales though, a large portion of the demand is driven by the fact that the items are only available in limited quantities. As a result these pushes generate huge spikes of traffic - it's spammy if you don't care that the selection quickly shrinks, but if you're a compulsive shopper (true for a large swath of the shopping population) then you depend on it.

Wait, people actually install apps to shop? Every time I've used a store app I've found it inferior to their mobile website which was, in turn, inferior to their full website.

Agreed. The apps are getting better though (and have to - a lot of businesses are seeing 30 - 50% of usage/revenue coming via mobile). It's not a preference for businesses because they've spent a decade investing in the web and now mobile is coming along, but its driven by end users. If you don't adapt, your competitors will, and they'll eat your lunch as a result.

Oh HELL NO. If you push a notification to my device after I walk out of the sales process I am uninstalling your app immediately and rating you 1 star, you dirty fucker.

I believe you're missing the point. This is not another way to get spam, but to save some money on something you're interested in but did not yet purchase it.

"For recovering abandoned carts, many ecommerce sites use email. Apps, however, are just getting started. With half of emails now opened on a mobile device, email is much less effective (unless you use deep links)."

Can someone explain what the author means here? It seems that if you are using an app on your mobile device to shop, and emails sent to you are likely to be opened on that same device, then email would be a good way to notify you.

Probably coz the ecommerce sites are usually not mobile optimized and that leads to user totally abandoning the checkout.

The "unless you use deep links" parenthetical kills the entire article. Not providing a call to action that allows your customer to make the purchase is just bothering the user to no effect!

Are people seriously sending out emails that say "This dress you might like is available in your size. Please open our app, find our search feature, remember the name of the dress we were telling you about, input your size that we apparently already know, add it to your cart, and checkout"?

> The "unless you use deep links" parenthetical kills the entire article. Not providing a call to action that allows your customer to make the purchase is just bothering the user to no effect!

Not exactly - deeplinks done well take you right to the check out page, where all you have to do is confirm the purchase. Most push notifications for the moment open you into a random page into the app, which, I agree, doesn't really add value.

What I meant was - most emails don't include deep links. Take LinkedIn for example - if you click a CTA from a LinkedIn email, it takes you into a browser (even if you have the app on your phone).

Most emails still function this way. It doesn't work because while the user might be logged into your iPhone app, they're likely not logged into your website in mobile safari/chrome.

Emails are a good way to notify you, if you want to still go search/navigate. They don't take you right to checkout though, which is negative for conversion.

How about coding sites such that folks don't need to 'add to cart' in order to find out what they'd actually be paying if they were to purchase? That's most often why I 'abandon' carts. They make me start a cart in order to see the bottom line.

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