Authors:
Jessica Snead, Susan Brosnan, Daniel Goins, Patricia Hogan
Abstract:
Often an online retailer is needlessly holding reservations on items that are in abandoned shopping carts. This idea is to improve the processing of abandoned shopping carts by incenting shoppers to purchase the items or clearly release the items. The idea focuses on allowing the shopper to update the abandoned cart’s metadata to indicate the shopper’s intentions regarding the abandoned shopping cart.
Background:
When an e-commerce customer abandons their cart, the retailer does not know what the customer expects. There are many unknowns around intent and potential negotiations that could make or break a sale and can impact the retailer's inventory if items are reserved.
Some existing strategies to mitigate this:
- Reserve items in a cart for some predefined number of hours. This can impact other shoppers who are ready to buy, because some items are reserved and not available.
- Send reminder emails about items still in a cart, but this is annoying to shoppers.
- Send a coupon to customers after some predefined number of hours to persuade the customer to make a purchase; this is better for the customer, but still impacts other customers and inventory.
- Delete a cart after some predefined number of hours; not many retailers do this, since it's not good customer service.
- Provide in-cart notifications on stock changes or price changes; this is a good compromise, but doesn't help with inventory or provide incentive to purchase.
- do not reserve the items, but put the items on a wish list for that customer.
- have a chat-bot on the website to engage the customer in an online conversation.
Description:
This solution allows the customer to interact with their cart metadata to achieve a better outcome for both parties (shopper and online retailer). Instead of the retailer making assumptions about the shoppers’ intentions regarding the abandoned shopping cart items, signed-in customers could indicate metadata such as their shopping trip intent (browsing, plan to purchase today, would purchase with a discount, etc.), which would then allow the retailer to tailor their incentives to the customer's intent. This results in happier customers and better use of retailer resources. If they're just browsing, what could persuade them to make a purchase. If they're planning to buy, what could persuade them to add more to the cart? If they're on the fence, both parties can negotiate. If the shopper was just “window shopping” and has
Abandoned Cart Behavior Use Case:
Customer browses online and adds items to a cart.
Customer stops actively browsing. What is their intent?
- not interested and not coming back.
- might come back with incentive
- coming right back but got distracted
What does the retailer do with the cart?
- Are the items reserved? for how long?
- Time out and remove items after xx minutes?
- Try to lure the customer back with incentives?
- How long to wait before nagging?
- How long to wait before incentivizing?
What if the retailer makes the wrong assumption or something goes wrong?
- Customer already checked out but the retailer still thinks there's an abandoned cart
- Customer has no intention of making a purchase, but the retailer is reserving items anyway, preventing others from purchasing them?
Our idea is that the customer could communicate their cart intent.
- Just browsing
- Please reserve
- Interested in buying but wants to negotiate cost
Our idea is that the customer could access and modify their shopping cart metadata.
- If the store assumes a cart is still active but it isn't - have a way to clear the data but also communicate the wrong assumption to the store.
- If the customer is very interested but doesn't have time to shop now, request an item reservation for a set amount of time.
- If the customer is just browsing, the retailer can consider how to influence a purchase and/or realize how many customers are doing this and might need additional features (such as wish list, shopping list, save cart for later, etc.). And the shopper can tell the retailer "stop nagging me" or "I'd buy X with a #% discount", etc.
- If the customer is making a purchase, the retailer can consider how to persuade them to purchase more and/or how to improve loyalty and satisfaction.
Claims:
The ability for the shopper to modify the online shopping cart’s metadata to indicate the shopper’s intentions regarding the items in the online shopping cart.
TGCS Reference 3078
