Hi - I have a client that uses Foxycart and it works very well. A while ago we set-up some goals in analytics to monitor conversion rates and so on. One of the things we've noticed is that around 80% of the visitors who get to the checkout page then abandon the transaction and don't complete the sale. Looking around on the web, this figure doesn't seem terrible but doesn't seem great either - abandonment rates generally seem to be around 60%-80%.
My client is obviously keen to improve this because they (probably correctly) take the view that there is some lost revenue here.
I therefore have a couple of questions -
1. Does anyone know if 80% abandonment is about par for the course for Foxycart sites or is it in your experience, not great?
2. Does anyone have any experience of improving the checkout that successfully reduced the abandonment rate?
regards,
Gordon
I'll ask @brett to reply on the abandonment figures - he'll have a better idea on that than me - but could you let us know which store this is for (whisper if it's private) so we can take a look at the checkout?
Unfortunately, we don't have that info available system-wide, so … I'd love to give an answer, but it wouldn't be based on any solid data. That said…
My biggest suggestion is A/B testing. Google Analytics new Content Experiments work pretty well, though they're not super advanced. But it's pretty amazing how significant an improvement you might be able to get.
Another thought would be to set up some additional goals (or just events, if not full goals, which might make more sense depending on how you've got things set up) for behavior on the checkout itself. Like an event when a checkout form field is filled in, when shipping is selected, when a CC# is entered, when/if a checkout error occurs. That might get you some valuable info if there's a specific problem that's causing abandonment.
regards,
Gordon
* Create both options you want to test.
* Use some javascript to randomly decide which option you want to test. My thinking here is that you'd show/hide specific HTML depending. (Or maybe you base which version to load on the session string or something.)
* You'd add a hidden custom checkout field with the option you've loaded up, so you can use that to track. (And make sure you respect which version you may have already loaded so if the user gets a checkout error they see the same version on reload.)
That'd be a somewhat manual approach, but since the Google Analytics Content Experiments require two separate pages, this is probably what'd make the most sense to test the checkout. (Testing anything else should work fine with a Content Experiment. I know I mentioned Content Experiments in my previous post, but I either wasn't thinking, or I had a flash of brilliance that I'm missing now.)
Also, this:
That should be relatively easy to add, and could provide interesting information. Like "Are people entering their email before leaving, or are they bailing right away?" That'd be the lowest hanging fruit here, and it'd be pretty easy to set up:
EDIT: I'll share this code once I confirm it's working and that it actually makes sense.
Yeah. My bad. If you're still interested, let me know. Fwiw though @fc_adam and I are working on a much more turnkey approach to Google Analytics for a future version of FoxyCart.
For a variety of reasons I'm not all that keen on the idea but I can see what they're trying to do and I said I would investigate if it's possible. I guess it would mean changing the 'checkout' button on the cart and inserting an additional page which then had a button on it to go to the real checkout page plus also record the email address.
This is obviously fairly non-standard stuff but is something like this possible?
cheers, Gordon
Something like that is possible - but would add an additional step for customers which techincally adds another point where users could abandon.
If you're just wanting to do that to capture email addresses - you could look at using a service like rejoiner to track those customers that don't complete. Take a look at that here: http://www.foxycart.com/features/integrations/rejoiner
I've now had a good look at rejoiner, tried it with foxycart and also spoken to Mike at rejoiner. The downside is that, as I understand it, because there isn't a full integration between rejoiner and foxycart, although we can capture email addresses we can only take users straight back to their checkout page while foxycart still remembers what it was (or is it while foxycart cookies still persist?). Otherwise we have to take them back to our home page, for example, which probably won't result in so many conversions.
So, a couple of questions: firstly, do you know if you have any plans to do any more integration work with rejoiner? If not, do you know if it's the kind of thing I could do myself? (I can see capturing information about the contents of the cart from the checkout page not being too difficult. I'm just not sure how I would go about re-creating the cart at the other end of the process.)
Secondly, can you tell me how long foxycart shopping carts should persist for?
cheers, Gordon
Good questions.
We don't currently have any immediate plans for a Rejoiner integeration. I believe the existing integration is just want Rejoiner built out from their side, we haven't done any work on that yet.
There are certainly ways you could go about repopulating the cart to resume the checkout - it will come down to how you get that data from Rejoiner, and if you need to refetch data about your products from your database in order to get all the details. It's definitely possible to do though.
In terms of the cart session - they last for 12 hours.
Also as a quick aside - we have a second service that has set up a FoxyCart integration with their system that can assist with capturing abandoned carts, you can see details of that at http://www.foxycart.com/features/integrations/cartstack
Thanks for the info Adam. Just so you know, we're not going to go ahead with Rejoiner, partly because of the lack of integration with Foxycart and partly because we seemed to be getting quite a few "false positives' from it ie people who actually completed a sale being recorded as drop-outs.