cart abondonment

[fcasavant]

I would like to be able to monitor and analyze cart abondonment.

A common problem among Internet retailers is shoppers abandoning their virtual "shopping carts" before finalizing a purchase. Shipping as one of the main barriers to completing online sales. But there are possibly more. When customers see shipping charges that represent a significant portion of the item's price, they balk. Visitors to online stores also tend to use the cart as a shopping list, or to facilitate browsing or price comparisons

Another possible tool to curb Internet cart abandonment, could be a dynamic e-mail system that can recognize that the cart has been abandoned and then send an e-mail quickly to the shopper offering a discount or another type of incentive to encourage the final follow-through.

[ShopSite Lauren]

You can enable Google Analytics within ShopSite to see your cart numbers to see how often carts are being abandoned and at what stage.
Merchandising > Google > Analytics

There are also some add-on modules that you could use by third party companies. I believe that there is one by LexiConn, there may be others. I have also seen some merchants who add javascript onto their shopping cart screen so that if a customer is leaving their website from the cart page, that a popup comes up with a special offer, or a form asking why they are leaving, or something like that. I personally don't like that as a shopper, but if cart abandonment is a big issue on a website, this is a good feature for finding out why so many customers are leaving.

ShopSite does not have a capability that you are describing. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that from the cart page, there is no personal information which is entered. The customer will see all of their totals, product totals, shipping totals, tax totals, surcharges, before they continue on to the billing screen where they will then enter in their personal information including email, address, and payment info. If a customer leaves at the second step, ShopSite does not provide you with access to their cart information for security reasons, to protect the customer's information that they may have entered.

[lbohen]

Lauren; If a user wanted to ask (optionally) for an email address on the shopping cart page, how can this be accomplished?