Back in 2010, I wrote about a way to see how much money website visitors were adding to the shopping cart so that amount could be compared to the amount that was actually purchased. The post also showed how you could see this “money left on the table” by product and product category. Recently, however, I had a client ask a similar question, but one focused on whether the product price was possibly a barrier to cart conversion. Specifically, the question was asked whether visitors who add products to the cart that are between $50 and $100 end up purchasing more or less than those adding products valued at a different price range. While there are some ways to get to this information using the implementation approach I blogged about in the preceding post, in this post, I will share a more straightforward way to answer this question.
CAPTURING ADD TO CART VALUE
In the preceding post, to see money left on the table, I suggested that the amount of the product being added to the cart be passed to a new currency Success Event. But to answer our new question, you will want to augment that by passing the dollar amount to a Product Syntax Merchandising eVar when visitors add a product to the cart. For example, if a visitor adds product # 111 to the cart and its price is $100, the syntax would look like this:
s.events="scAdd,event10";
s.products=";111;;;event10=100;evar30=100";
In this case, the $100 cart value is being passed to both the currency Success Event and the Merchandising eVar (I suggest rounding the dollar amount to the nearest dollar to minimize SAINT Classifications later). Both of these amounts are “bound” to the product number (111 in this example).
Once this is done and repeated for all of your visitors, you can use the new Merchandising eVar to see Cart Additions by price of item added to cart using a report like this:
Since the new Merchandising eVar has been bound to the product added to the shopping cart, if the visitor purchases the product prior to the eVar’s expiration (normally purchase event), the eVar value will be applied to the purchase event as well for those products ultimately purchased. Therefore, when orders and revenue are set on the order summary page, each order will be “bound” to the product price value such that you can see a report that looks like this:
Using this report, you can see how each price point performs with respect to cart to order conversion. Since you will have many price points, you will likely want to use SAINT Classifications to group your price points into larger buckets or ranges to make the data more readable:
Once you have this, you can switch to the trended view of the report and see how each price range converts over time. Of course, you can break this down by product or external campaign code to see what factors result in the conversion rate being higher or lower than your standard cart conversion rate (Orders/Cart Additions). This analysis can be used in conjunction with my competitor pricing concept to see which products you should emphasize and de-emphasize on your online store. You can also use this new eVar in segments if you ever want to isolate cases in which a specific product price range was added to the cart or purchased.
As you can see, there are lots of handy uses for this implementation concept, so if you have a shopping cart, you may want to try it out and see what creative ways you can exploit it to further your analysis capabilities.