Abandoned Cart Program

[dwilliams]

Recently we began an abandoned cart program for both of our web sites. Basically what happens is this:

1. A customer comes to one of the web sites and adds items to their cart.
2. They begin to go through the checkout process.
3. Somewhere along the process they exit.
4. Their cart is automatically saved and within 24 hours we send them an email reminding them that they have a saved cart.

For our more consumer-oriented web site (www.scientificsonline.com) this has worked very well. Between 11/1/2003 and 12/18/2003 over 10% of those who abandoned their carts came back and completed the order. However, for our education site (www.sciencekit.com) which caters mainly to teachers, less than 2% returned to complete orders.

I was wondering if anyone out there could perhaps offer any insight as to why the education web site return conversion rate is so low?

[Corey Bryant]

On the education site - who are your buyers? Teachers, principals? They might realize that they might not be re-imbursed for the money they spend or it is over their budget.

[dwilliams]

Roughly 70% of the education site's customers are teachers. This includes some principals and other administrators, but the majority are teachers. The remaining 30% are classified as individuals - some of these may also be teachers but when registering they are not affiliating themselves with any school.

[Glenn Albert Bradley]

I tested the cart abandonment via half.com, where I have my small used book store, what I found was that the inventory shown is minus the amount in someones cart for a least a half hour. But what I also noticed was a reminder is sent to the customer titled "did you forget" or some friendly way, and lets them know that the items will be returned to stock in a specific time frame. I thought that was pretty cool. Perhaps the programs you are using or should be using may have this as a feature?