🛒 Don't Give Up On Me, Baby

Admit it - you’ve done it. Maybe you were just browsing. Maybe you were using your digital shopping cart as a ‘favorites’ folder. Maybe you just felt like hurting a retailer that day.

But you’ve definitely added items to your shopping cart online, then logged off without buying. Probably within the last week. Shame on you.

🤷‍♀️ Why are you talking about this?

Let’s review the traditional eComm funnel to root ourselves in some context:

The “Added to Cart” stage is hugely important to online retailers, because it indicates purchase intent - aka the increased probability that a customer will buy something. They are one step away from Chrome autofilling the heck out of some payment forms.

But then something happens, and they don’t check out. Dang.

Turns out, this is very common:

That means, as an online retailer, most of your sessions are doing nothing for sales. Consider the marketing effort and ad spend that was required to get customers to your site in the first place; seems bad for your ROI.

🦠 Recent lockdown developments

Apparently, being locked down in our homes accelerated abandoned carts even further. Amperity notes that abandoned cart rates rose above 94% at the onset of the pandemic, meaning only 6 out of 100 people were placing an order after adding an item to their cart. This normalized as lockdown went on.

Why? What happened?

Dopamine and digital window-shopping happened:

• You get a chemical kick when you add something to your cart. Your brain gets a nice little hit of dopamine when you shop online, even when you don’t actually purchase. The ritual of browsing and adding is enough to make it pleasurable and encourage repetition of the behavior

• Lockdown has forced shoppers to eCommerce en masse, so they can’t physically window-shop. They’ve transitioned to window-shopping / browsing online instead

So, people were scared and annoyed at the whole COVID situation, and chose to drown their sorrows in hypothetical sales. They also couldn’t go to the mall, so they looked around online.

Btw, customers really do use shopping carts as a ‘wish list’ or ‘save for later’ mechanism. They’ll load up their cart, whittle it down to a few items, or purchase nothing at all. This is a big contributing factor, too.

This all seems like a disaster. You’re running campaigns and breaking your back to get people into your digital ecosystem, and only a few are placing orders. Well, 1) yeah, that’s true, but 2) there’s one silver lining:

When customers spend time on your site, they are spending time with your brand. They are becoming familiar with your products, your UI/UX, your whole vibe. When it comes time to pull the trigger, your brand has a better shot at being their go-to destination.

Adding to cart also indicates they like your stuff. It’s a vote in the positive column for your products; pay attention to the add-to-cart rate and optimize item placement and incentives around that data.

🌱 Are cannabis shoppers different?

I’m happy to report that online shoppers behave very differently when they are buying cannabis than when they are buying shoes or watches or, like, Snuggies.

Cart abandonment rates are orders of magnitude lower than in traditional eCommerce; more like 25-40% (depending on the market).

There’s a few reasons why this makes sense:

• Medically-speaking: even in adult-use markets, cannabis is, by far, the most popular alternative medicine for a number of ailments. For some people, ordering cannabis is non-negotiable, unlike ordering weird bluetooth shower speakers on Amazon

• Recreationally-speaking: purchase intent for any mind-altering substance that people enjoy is quite high. When you want some beer, you make beer happen. When you want a joint, you make joint happen

‼ What do we do about it?

Even though abandonment rates are relatively low in cannabis, any abandonment is a missed sale opportunity. And there are measures cannabis retailers should take to mitigate that abandonment rate ticking up.

1) Your eCommerce provider should reveal any / all menu interactions to you via an API

2) You should connect that data feed to whatever marketing / loyalty tools you use (springbig, Alpine IQ, or traditional platforms like SFDC, Hubspot etc.) and automate a “retargeting campaign,” where you send SMS or email messages to your customers that forgot to check out.

Recapturing even a small percentage of those high-intent shoppers is worth it.

📚 tl: dr

• Abandoned carts are when customers add something to their shopping cart and bounce

• Across traditional retail, 75% of carts are abandoned. It got worse at the beginning of lockdown, because people needed dopamine, and they needed to window-shop

• Cannabis has much lower rates (25-40%), partially due to its medically-necessary nature

• As a cannabis retailer, you should have a well-thought-out and automated retargeting program

• It is Thursday