I read this article in New York Times online and thought that it related just great to our topic of E-Commerce.
This article is about a new web service, called Abandonment Tracker Pro, that will alert a subscribing web store that a customer put items in a shopping cart but did not complete the transaction. The difference between Abandonment Tracker and other similar services is that it is able to start "remarketing" immediately in real time. Mr. Nicholls, the founder of the company SeeWhy that came out with the new service, recommends online stores to ask shoppers to register and provide their e-mail address and telephone numbers on the first page. This way it will make it much easier for Abandonment Pro to capture the information about the shopper. The next step for the online store would be to follow up with the shopper either via e-mail or phone. When asked about possibly turning off potential customers by annoying e-mails or, even worse, phone calls, Mr. Nicholls replied that everything depends on the tone and manner. The message should sound more like,"Was there a problem? How can we help?" Mr Nicholls also believes that online stores will most likely lose sales if they wait for a couple of days before they follow up with the customer. According to Mr. Nichols, Abandonment Tracker may alleviate the problem of increasing shopping cart abandonment when shoppers place items in their shopping carts but do not make a purchase.
Personally, I would never come back to the web-site that would try to chase me after I decide not to make a purchase. I think it is annoying, and it is invasion in people's privacy. If I decided not to complete the transaction, then there was a reason for it. And imagine you visited five different web-sites looking for the same thing, you bought it from one site, and the other four had Abandonment Tracker, and all four of them would harass you 5 minutes later about why you did not buy from them. That would be insane, I would probably stop shopping online altogether.
References:
1. The New York Times. "Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door." Stross, Randall. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17digi.html?_r=1&ref=business May 16, 2009
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Polina, if you received an email from one of these retailers where you had abandoned the order, and it simply stated something like "We're sorry we could not serve you better today. Please allow us to offer you 10% off [or some other incentive] to tell us about your experience" Would you take it?
ReplyDeleteMost of the receipts I get from any restaurant or store -- lately -- has an offer to enter a big raffle, or for free services, all I have to do is call the 1800 number and answer a few questions.
This just gets me to thinking - this is a great tool, used in the right way. Most of the places we shop on line now, we've already created an account (like amazon, ebay ) -- if you opt out of marketing offers when you create your profile -- I would think this also opts you our of these tracking related followups.
This is kind of the same thing to women as "window shopping" I tend to agree with you that i would be more annoyed with a company for tracking me and "annoying" me. It just seems like they are trying to maintain all the people who visit their site. Its difficult to imagine these people tracking me down just because i visited the site, and "shopped around" I guess I can't be opposed to this marketing strategy and using their business talents to try and maintain customers. Every customer is valuable to a business.
ReplyDeleteI agree with rose in the "window shopping" and that I would definitely be annoyed by this. I have noticed because of the amount of workers that flock to you when you go in a store. Sometimes I just want to go in and look around and I know i'm not going to buy anything so they first thing I say when they come up is i'm just looking and that normally keeps them away. If every time I went to a website put something in my cart and then decided not to buy and got an email it would drive me crazy. I mean I understand they are just trying to keep their customers and make sure that you will come back or figure out a way to get you back to buy something but I would definitely just find it annoying.
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