shopping cart software

To download the full Version 5 Manual, please go to http://manual.volusion.com

Volusion Version 5 provides merchants a wide array of tools to not only better manage their online store, but also aid in marketing their store and addressing their customers' needs.

One of the more advanced tools that Volusion provides in this respect is the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page. This page actually tracks instances of the Volusion shopping cart, including information such as the products that are in the cart and even customer information if supplied.

The "Abandoned / Live Carts" page will track different shopping cart instances that have been created by current visitors to the Volusion storefront or carts that have been created and then abandoned (products were loaded into the cart but never taken through the storefront's checkout process).

This information can be very valuable to merchants in that this page will give them an immediate snapshot of what store visitors are currently browsing within the actual Volusion store as well as what customers are shopping from the store but leaving before checkout as well as what those customers were attempting to purchased. This can be used to help online business owners market their stores.

Getting Started:

Accessing the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page is easy:

• First, in the Volusion Administration Page, click on the Orders tab.
• Click on the "Abandoned / Live Carts" link in the blue menu bar.
• Merchants should now see the "Abandoned / Live Carts" table.

This table will list each currently open or abandoned cart that has been created within the Volusion storefront. Within this table, merchants have access to view information about the cart itself, the customer that created (if applicable) and the products within the cart at the time.

Part I - Reading the Abandoned / Live Carts Table:

Once the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page is loaded, by default, merchants will see the page is divided into two regions. The upper region will consist of the normal table view with a listing of all live or abandoned carts within the system. The lower portion of the page will contain the "Quick Edit Window".

Within the main "Abandoned / Live Carts" table, the following information will be displayed:

Abandoned / Live Carts
CartID	This field contains a random string of characters that Volusion automatically generates for each live or abandoned cart. The system uses this field to identify each cart. Clicking on a cart's ID will display its contents in the Quick Edit Window at the bottom of the screen.
CustomerID	For any customer who has an account with the Volusion store and is logged into that account, the customer's ID will be displayed in this field. Anonymous customers - ones not logged in or with no current customer account - will have no customer ID registered with their live or abandoned carts.
Phone Number	If the customer that created the cart is logged in at the time of its creation, the phone number associated with their store account will be recorded in this field.
Email Address	For any customer logged into the store when creating a live or abandoned cart, the email address associated with their customer account will be recorded in this field.
Notes	This filed is provided as a way for merchants to add notes to each live or abandoned cart if needed.
Cart Item Count	This field lists the number of products stored within the cart. This number reflects the total quantity of any product in the cart as opposed to the number of unique products.
Last Modified	This field will contain a timestamp listing when the cart was last modified.

The "Quick Edit Window" will display the contents of any live or abandoned cart. Uses can simply click a cart within the "Abandoned / Live Carts" table to load that cart into the "Quick Edit Window".

Here, merchants will be able to review not only the information listed in the main "Abandoned / Live Carts" table but also a list of every product within the page - including product codes, option IDs, prices and quantities for each product.

Clicking on the product code for each product listed here will redirect to the actual product listing in the Volusion Administration Page.

Summary:

The above information simply lists how to access and view information concerning the "Abandoned / Live Carts" feature in Volusion. Part II of this chapter will illustrate how merchants can use this page to their advantage.

Part II - Using the Abandoned / Live Carts Page:

Merchants using the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page can use the feature of the page to gain information about what is going on in this store from the perspective of what customers are attempting to order but then what?

Checking Abandoned Carts for Quality Control:

First, merchants can use this page to determine how many abandoned carts are being generated as well as how frequently by examining the LastModified field for each cart (typically, live carts will have a very recent timestamp as opposed to abandoned carts). This can then be taken a step further by examining the contents of recently abandoned carts.

Upon examining recently abandoned carts, one might find a common thread among the products that were abandoned by different customers - such as the same 1 or 2 products being abandoned by multiple customers. Merchants can use this information to further investigate these products - perhaps the one of the products is out of stock and was not set to be hidden while out of stock or possibly a set of options configured for the product may be confusing customers and thus, causing them to abandon the order.

Merchants can make use of abandoned cart information to check their online store for quality control issues quite easily using these techniques.

Pre-emptive Marketing:

One of the benefits of the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page is that that it will list the contact information for customers who are logged into the Volusion store. Merchants can use this information to contact customers regarding possible orders.

For example, after examining the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page, a merchant notices a regular customer in good standing with the store has created several abandoned carts. Using the customer's information listed in the abandoned carts, the merchant can contact the customer regarding their aborted purchases. This can generate valuable information for the merchant - perhaps the customer has found the same or similar product online elsewhere at a better price or maybe the customer is having trouble making up their mind on a purchase

Empowered by this kind of information, merchants may be able to use situations like these to turn a lost sale into a closed sale or even address issues with their products they were unaware of - such as that of a new competitor's price.

Regaining a Customer's Lost Cart:

There is one additional feature of the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page that merchants have access to. Within each cart's settings in the "Quick Edit Window", merchants have the ability to reload the contents of the cart into either their storefront's checkout page or the Phone Order page within the store's back-end.

This can be used by merchants to actually create the order that was abandoned and can be used to view the potential customer's order from a different perspective or ever to actually place the order.

For example, a registered customer with the site attempts to place and order but fails to complete it due to a web browser or computer crash. Maybe the order was quite large and the customer is either unable to remember the products they were planning on ordering or simply can't recreate the cart.

If the customer contacts the store merchant in this scenario, the merchant can use the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page to quickly find the customer's cart and can even check the customer out through the phone order page.

Note that this feature is unavailable for any live or abandoned cart created by a store administrator and will only work for regular or anonymous customers.

Disabling Collecting of Customer Contact Info:

The ability for the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page to collect customer contact info can be beneficial to merchants. However, some merchants may not wish to collect their customer information in this manner. Disabling this feature of the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page is simple.

Within the main "Abandoned / Live Carts" table view page, click on the purple CartIDLog Settings link in the page to reveal the Enable_Collect_Cart_Contact_Info option. Uncheck this option and click the Save Changes button to deactivate the "Abandoned / Live Carts" page's ability to report customer phone numbers and email addresses within each cart.

Deleting Abandoned Carts:

Processing an abandoned cart by loading it into the "Quick Edit Window" and completing the abandoned cart as an order will remove that cart from the Abandoned / Live Carts page. Currently, there is no function to delete abandoned cart records from this page.

Summary:

Making use of Volusion's "Abandoned / Live Carts" feature is simple. The information contained therein and how it can be used to Volusion-based merchants' advantage is quite powerful. Merchants can use this page to gather information about customer behavior and use to not only make improvements in their online store's products but how it offers those products as well as allows additional avenues for merchants to interact with their customers to potentially generate more sales.

Please Note: You may see the same IP address over and over. In a lot of the cases, you may be seeing a search engine indexing your site. You should be able to login to your account with the search engine, like Google Analytics, and turn down how often they index your site. You can look up an ip address and see if it belongs to a search engine using free websites such as ip-lookup.net.

Tags: abandoned carts, lost carts, reports