SlickText Help Center

What is an Abandoned Cart?

For eCommerce brands, an abandoned cart is a term referring when a visitor adds items into their online cart but exits the page without completing their purchase. Abandoned carts are viewed as one of the biggest causes of lost revenue for retail businesses.

The stats are alarming. Recent studies show that 73-86% of carts are abandoned, varying by device use. This means on average, 3 out of every 4 sales are lost during the cash-out process. Why?

The Issue

Research done through surveys of real customers breaks down the "behind the scenes " issue. Upwards of 60% of visitors will abandon a cart due to unforeseen costs that only show once you check out. These costs are typically known as delivery and shipping, but can also contain other fees. Other issues include requirements to create an account with an online retailer before being able to purchase, a complicated checkout process, and a difficult to navigate website.

While there are other reasons for cart abandonment, there is a clear idea of what your customers expect: Transparency and their time (which is directly affected by the latter two issues)

The Solution 

It comes as a relief that the largest issue surrounding abandoned carts (unknown costs) has an easy solution which is addressed using the built-in recovery tool in SlickText. The most powerful and profitable message type that can be sent out is an abandoned cart text message, used to recover the lost profit.

If your online business normally charges for shipping or other fees, the best way to recover a percentage sales is to automatically have a text message sent out once a cart is abandoned. This text message should house a promo code for free shipping to ease the customer into making the purchase. At 60% of users stating this is their top reason for not completing their online purchase, there is a potential for recovering up to 60% of lost profits!

How Does it Work?

SlickText offers a built-in Shopify integration option which can be set up in just minutes. Shopify then passes any data you choose over to SlickText, including tags, last purchase date for a customer, and if a user abandons a cart. A cart is deemed abandoned if the user does not complete the purchase and no changes have been made to the cart within a short period of time. A change to a cart could be adding a new item, deleting an item, changing shipping information, etc.

     A typical checkout process has 4 steps

1. Check out - Brings the user to their cart to start processing the order
2. Shipping Page - User inputs where their order is sent to. This is where SlickText gains the users phone number compliantly to be able to text the visitor
3. Billing - Confirms the users billing information
4. Confirmation page - Completes the order

For SlickText to target your visitors with a follow-up text message, a user just needs to input their phone number into the shipping page. The user can then be compliantly added to your text list for future text messages. Shopify will tell SlickText that said user has not touched their cart in X amount of time, where SlickText then sends out your customized abandoned cart text.

Stats show that sending out a text message 15 minutes after a cart has been abandoned with a free shipping promo code brings back upwards of 20% of users to complete their purchase. We also advise sending out another text message the following day with a promotion for users who have not made a move, with a more incentivizing offer such as a percentage off promo code.

Tracking

We can know with 100% certainty that a visitor converts from your text message based on the promo code used in the text message. Because Shopify offers for an abandoned cart email to go out, which may contain the same offer for free shipping, we advise making the promo code for the text message and email different, but having the same effect. Both offer free shipping, but the code is different. Then you an appropriately credit a cart being recovered from the correct source. SlickText analytics will also provide a breakdown of your recovery rates, recovered revenue vs revenue lost, conversions, and more. These stats are sent to us by Shopify through the integration.