Here’s what caught my attention in the commerce space this week.
Inviting customers back to their carts
Only three out of every 10 online shopping carts actually make it to checkout, according to email marketing vendor Listrak. That’s 70% of carts lying abandoned in the virtual corridors of ecommerce. Listrak wants to improve those numbers. It’s one of several vendors offering “shopping cart abandonment solutions” — essentially, programs to follow up with shoppers who’ve left the store and ask them, “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
Retailers would love to close more of those sales: Listrak estimates $18 billion lost in sales to U.S. retailers every year. A Forrester study last May found that 89% of consumers had abandoned a shopping cart at least once. Forrester’s authors attributed that high rate to growing user sophistication: as shoppers become more experienced online, they are more likely to comparison shop even as they move toward checkout. Other industry observers offer a simpler explanation: shoppers are shocked at high shipping costs. A 2006 study by Goecart blamed comparison shopping, high shipping costs, and plain old running out of time as the leading causes of abandonment.
Listrak sampled Internet Retailer’s Top 1000 online retailers, loading up carts and then abandoning them (“Hey you kids! Knock it off!”) to see who would follow up. Only 14.6% sent a follow-up email, and fewer still sent a second or third email which, Listrak’s CEO Ross Kramer told Internet Retailer, is where about half of the revenue comes from. Among Listrak’s suggestions to retailers: get the shopper’s email address first.
X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.Intuit cuts payment rate for AT&T subscribers
Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T for its GoPayment mobile payment solution, which competes with Square. Like Square, Intuit offers a free card-swiping attachment that plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry device, allowing anyone to collect credit card payments. Intuit’s basic rate of 2.7% slightly undercuts Square’s 2.75%, but AT&T customers will pay even less (1.7%).
Intuit originally charged customers $175 for the swiper dongle, but last January, in a bid to compete with Square, it began offering the dongle for free. Still, Intuit has struggled to gain the visibility that Square founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois and high-profile investors like Richard Branson have brought to Square. This week’s deal with AT&T is a reminder that Intuit is serious about GoPayment, which may actually offer more to merchants since it integrates with QuickBooks, its bookkeeping package that also targets small businesses.
PayPal embraces NFC (just a little)
PayPal has made something of a point of not jumping on the NFC bandwagon, emphasizing the technology-agnostic nature of its mobile payments platform. Demonstrations at PayPal’s recent Innovate conference emphasized payment options like PayPal’s Empty Hand system, which lets you buy things with only your mobile number and a PIN.
Still, NFC seems an inevitable part of the payments picture in the years ahead, and this week, PayPal delivered the peer-to-peer NFC payment technology that it promised last July. Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile Applications, wrote on the PayPal blog that the technology for NFC P2P is included in version 3.0 of PayPal’s Android app. No need for it in the iOS app yet, obviously, since the most recent iPhone upgrade disappointingly didn’t include support for NFC.
As we noted back in July, in practice, the transfer of funds through PayPal’s NFC system isn’t substantially different from what was already possible using Bump, which sends the transfer through servers in the cloud rather than wirelessly between the mobiles. But the NFC system will let PayPal developers acquire experience with NFC wireless transfers, which should serve them well as NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals begin to show up next year and beyond.
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If you’re interested in learning more about the commerce space, check out DevZone on x.com, a collaboration between O’Reilly and X.commerce.
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