After around 8 months of working at cultfit, I moved to a new team: Team Wellness. And the first and exciting project that came to us was cross-selling wellness products to fitness users. Of the massive project, a small part was cart abandonment, an experiment that turned out too good to be true. But firstly
“Abandonment is an e-commerce term used to describe a visitor on a web page who leaves that page before completing the desired action.”
Shopping cart abandonment refers to visitors who add items to their online shopping cart but exit without purchasing. This somehow feels counterintuitive; if a user has made all the effort to find, select a thing, and add it to the cart, why won’t he purchase it?
The average cart abandonment rate globally lies somewhere around 72% according to statista.com, which means that out of 100 users who add something to the cart, only 28 will make payment. This looks like a huge percentage, and probably that’s why e-commerce sites focus so much on a clear visible cart, cart abandonment mailers, push notification, etc
Cult.fit provides a range of services and products from gym memberships to healthy food delivery and a lot more. Of all the verticals, a good business comes from e-commerce i.e. fitstore. Users can buy apparel, equipment, and supplements from here, and with every e-commerce comes cart abandonment.
On fitstore, ~20% of people purchase after adding something to the cart, where 99% of the purchases happen within 24hrs of adding. We call it a d0 purchase. Post that, the purchases are nearly zero for d1 and exactly 0 for d2, d3, and so forth.
To improve the overall orders, we should help the 80% of users who have not purchased even after 24 hours window get back to the funnel (have a very low probability of doing it by themselves based on data) and help us increase the orders.
Hypothesis testing is important for every sector and with fast paced startups we test fast and learn learn.
To quickly check the hypothesis, we build a widget using the existing atoms in the library and placed it on pages with good overlap of high DAU and our target audience.
We ran A/B between the marketing banners and the targeted cart abandonment widget while analysing the overall view > purchase conversions for the users. We did it for 2 weeks to get a statistically significant data and we observed that the cart abandonment widget performed great with .8% conversions. This means users who were previously not making any purchase on d1 and d2 days are now converting and purchasing items - helping increase the overall revenue generated.
And the overall view > purchase conversion went 40X times of posters it has replaced. This is since these are highly targeted and are shown to users with a high probability of converting
Along the whole time of experiment we collected some qualitative data from internal users as well which became a foundation of our next step to the project.
