Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment with UpSellit.com

Abandon Cart! Abandon Cart! It's Sunday morning, and you are surfing your favorite online store, adding a handful of items to your shopping cart, then suddenly as if seeing an online iceberg dead-ahead (or simply distracted by a screaming child), you quickly close the browser window and before you know it you've done what, according to Forrester Research, more than 50 percent of online shoppers do every time they visit a web store: you've abandoned cart.

Max Loewenthal doesn't hold this against you. In fact, as Director of Business Development at UpSellit.com, Max understands your e-commerce iceberg dilemma better than most people. Mr. Loewenthal and UpSellit work with CJ advertisers and provide them with custom website abandonment solutions that increase conversion and provide actionable business insight on 100 percent pay-for-performance pricing.

In short: UpSellit helps companies bring abandoned shoppers (like yourself on that lazy Sunday morning) back to their website to complete the purchase through one of their three shopping cart abandonment solutions: SmartAgent® Automated Chat, Datahound® Email ReMarketing, and their Dynamic Abandonment Survey.

When you are remarketing to a consumer, you already know what they were looking for when they arrived at the advertiser's website, what they were interested in when they got there, and with UpSellit's technology, you have a fairly good idea of why they abandoned. By combining these three key customer insights, you can send a highly targeted and timed remarketing email with our Datahound remarketing solution that will resonate with your consumer in a way that is not possible with traditional email marketing. This creates an immediate connection between the brand and the consumer that goes beyond that initial purchase decision.

UpSellit has identified a broad range of reasons consumers abandon their shopping cart, and these tend to vary based on the goods sold, the demographic buying them, and the website selling them. Through millions of chat logs and email campaign optimizations, UpSellit has confirmed shopping cart abandonment plagues online retailers of all sizes.

It's common for an optimized website selling brand-name merchandise to have comparison shopping and shipping concerns be their top reasons for abandonment. That said, an advertiser selling a unique product will likely see insufficient information or policy concerns be their top reasons for abandonment…so it really depends on a variety of factors.

The U.S. company, based in Westlake Village, California, takes pride in the fact that all of their personnel are in-house and their technology is homegrown. With over 10 years of development into creating their suite of solutions, UpSellit has saved over $1,102,998,632 in revenue and recovered over 14,847,202 conversions to date.

Since joining CJ in 2007, UpSellit has also reached CJ Performer status and helped increase sales as much as 30 percent for CJ Network advertisers. In 2011, they generated a 302.4 percent average lift in revenue across multiple industries, proving their value in the affiliate channel and CJ Network year after year. It's only in the affiliate channel and CJ Network where unique publishers like UpSellit can impact an online business in such a powerful, profitable way.

Affiliate metrics focus on clicks and sales, which are obviously fundamental. However we're not a traditional affiliate publisher simply sending traffic to a website. We get paid to drive additional sales to our advertisers' websites, but the fact is we also add a lot of value through marketing insight.

For example, if somebody uses our SmartAgent chat technology, we're obviously going to recover abandoned shopping carts, but we'll also get feedback from customers and non-customers. That is the kind of content we can glean from our reporting, so we've actually helped our advertisers change and improve their checkout process based on what they've learned through our technology.

Technology that packs a personal and powerful punch. Utilizing an Advanced Natural Language Parsing Engine, SmartAgent understands customer questions at the structural level and provides client-approved responses to achieve campaign objectives and enhance the customer experience, 24-hours-a-day, through a branded chat window that is completely customized and optimized by the UpSellit team.

We do all the heavy lifting. Our in-house marketing team works directly with the advertiser to create all the assets, from the look and feel of the design down to the wording. They can make changes up front, or they can make them after we go live, that's how powerful our technology is. We focus on reflecting the brand identity of the advertiser and making sure that they are happy with every aspect of the cart abandonment campaign.

For any potential advertisers who might be hesitant about using an automated chat solution like SmartAgent, or a pre-submit email remarketing solution like Datahound, Max says it's simply about educating them and working with CJ and the UpSellit team to develop exactly the kind of user experience the advertiser wants to deliver to their customers and what results they are hoping to achieve.

With Datahound, as with all our solutions, there are many campaign elements that we can monitor and optimize (for insights into these optimizations, check out UpSellit's blog). We A/B test aspects ranging from creative to copy, to business rules, incentives, and email subject lines. Since we only get paid on performance, it is always in our best interest to analyze and improve our shopping cart recovery campaigns.

We learn the culture of each advertiser and how they want us to handle their abandonment programs. Advertisers can leverage UpSellit's multiple abandonment solutions using one vendor / affiliate, allowing merchants to access all these solutions' reporting in one dashboard. This is in addition to the great CJ Account Management and the reporting CJ provides. Advertisers can see chat, email and survey performance, where site traffic originated, customer behavior, and the list goes on.

And while there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for shopping cart abandonment (with an endless amount of variables, no two ecommerce shopping experiences will have identical causes of cart abandonment) Max does offer some simple tips to help advertisers recover some of that lost revenue:

For advertisers interested in reducing their cart abandonment, an easy first step would be identifying and analyzing the stage of their funnel suffering from the largest drop-off. List the possible expectations that the customer may have at that stage and then evaluate how those expectations may be inconsistent with the experience provided.

About UpSellit:

Founded in 2005, UpSellit develops custom site abandonment solutions that increase conversions and provide actionable business insight. Currenlty partnered with a wide range of eBusinesses, UpSellit provides a very client-centric approach in which all development, hosting and optimization are handled for the client. With a simple copy and paste integration, no set-up fees, and 100 percent pay-for-performance pricing; UpSellit's customized abandonment solutions are the perfect fit for marketers looking to address their website abandonment.