Recovering abandoned carts

In running an e-commerce business, a merchant may sometimes come across an abandoned cart—if the e-commerce management software tracks it—a cart that could have become an order but, for some reason, stalled during the purchase process.

Can abandoned carts be recovered and turned into new orders?

The classic purchase process involves a customer arriving at the e-commerce site, identifying one or more products of interest, and adding them to the “shopping cart,” where they can check the products they want to order, the total cost, shipping costs, available payment methods, etc.

If everything aligns with their wishes, the next step is to place the order (click on “order”), then provide billing and shipping details and finally proceed with payment.

This purchase process may be interrupted for various reasons:

• The customer may add products to the cart and stop there, perhaps because they are doing a first pass on the site and do not yet have a real intention to purchase. Open2b by default tracks these carts as well, so that at least it can record which products were added and identify any trends—products added more than others but not purchased, etc.;
  However, if the user visited without registering or providing other information, it will be difficult to have tools for direct recovery of a potential order. In such cases, there are specific tools that attempt indirect recovery, for example showing a popup on the site with an offer aimed at keeping the customer from leaving. Or Google Remarketing, which shows targeted ads to the customer while browsing the web on Google partner sites for a limited period, aimed at bringing them back to the online store.

• Another reason might be mandatory site registration to place an order, if the specific customer does not want to register and provide more information than they consider necessary to complete an order.

• Or there might be something else that stopped them, such as the total cost or shipping costs, doubts about the right products, or sales/return conditions not presented clearly enough to build trust.

The Open2b platform tracks all these carts to provide the merchant with useful information to understand why a cart full of products did not turn into an order.

Active cart
In cases where registration is not mandatory and the customer, even without registering, moved forward in the purchase process by entering their details, we will have useful information for order recovery. We may have name and surname, a company name, a phone number, and above all an email (within the limits of privacy regulations). In Open2b, a cart containing these details of an unregistered customer is considered an Active cart, because there is a possibility to try to recover the sale.

Saved cart
In cases where the customer registers during the purchase process, the cart will be considered a Saved cart. The advantage of a saved cart is that it can be found ready if, even without completing the purchase immediately, the customer decides to return later and finish it.

Sending a cart recovery email
A very useful tool to increase sales through recovering abandoned carts is sending a dedicated email with a summary of the pending products and an invitation to return to the site to complete the order. Open2b allows both manual and automatic sending of the recovery email. It is a ready-made email in structure and content, automatically filled by the system so that the cart summary data and a button to return to the site to complete the order are added and sent to the customer. Automatic sending occurs when certain conditions are met and applies to both active and saved carts.

By using these strategies consistently, according to the latest research estimates, it is possible to recover up to 30% of abandoned carts, with a potentially significant increase in revenue.

Recovered cart
If a cart is completed and becomes an order as a result of recovery, it will be marked in Open2b as a Recovered cart

To test the cart recovery features of the Open2b e-commerce platform, in the dedicated Advanced B2B version, you can request a free trial and experience the unique flexibility of complete, customizable solutions developed entirely in Italy.

Tell us about your e-commerce project and you will receive proposals aligned with your needs. Choose how to contact us, by phone at +39 0587-53675 (Mon-Fri 9-13; 15-18.30) or by writing to commerciale@open2b.com