Made with XME: How to Prevent Cart Abandonment

Josh Loe, a Vice President Customer Experience at Unanet, once said: "Don't deliver a product, deliver an experience." Based on his work nature, he knew what he was talking about. The customer gets the experience much earlier than the desired product. The delivery itself does not take the last place in this process. It is core for customers WHEN they receive goods. It affects whether they want to buy a product or cooperate with a specific company. Let's consider where to start delivery service improvement and how a fast-code platform can help with it.

Why Do Customers Refuse to Buy Or How Do Stores Destroy Product Value

As of 2020, the e-commerce market size value is $10.3 trn. It's predicted to grow up to $27.1 trn. in 2027. Given the circumstances, people will buy online more often than in brick-and-mortar stores. We used to receive the goods in a regular shop at the time of payment. But it's much more difficult in e-commerce conditions.

In order not to keep customers waiting, large services such as Amazon and Alibaba have launched express delivery. But it's not enough. The client has to know how long he will wait for the purchase from the very beginning. It's even more important to allow him to choose one of several delivery options: expensive and faster, cheaper and longer, and something average.

Companies use software to calculate delivery times and costs. But the case is that the buyer can get such information only by opening the cart. This way, the software processes fewer requests. But the work of the calculation system will not be efficient since the customer most likely will not make a purchase. Why? - Following Statista, as of 2020, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is over 88%. In retail this rate is 84.5%, in consumer electronics area - 85.4%.

Among the variety of reasons that lead to such sad statistics, unexpected shipping costs, and long waiting are the first places. Following the Baymard Institute survey, 68% of respondents abandoned their shopping carts for the above reasons.

If the buyer does not see the delivery time and cost starting choosing products, he will not return next time, as he might feel cheated.

Retailers need to treat shipping as a critical piece of their business – or risk being left behind. A brand’s shipping experience can carry as much weight as the marketing or products themselves. Spending the time and money getting to know customers’ shipping expectations might not be at the top of the priority list, but our research shows it holds the potential to deliver repeat shoppers and increased sales.

~ Mark Adams,

Vice President at BigCommerce

Thus, to facilitate a purchase or retain a client through a positive user experience, it is necessary to provide him with all information from the start. Even from a legal point of view, the customer must know all the essential terms of the deal to conduct it. Practically the same rule applies to customer-company relations in general: the client must know all the essential terms of the deal from the very beginning. So he will tend to trust the seller.

So, the business should focus on solutions that allow customers to know about the time and cost of delivery immediately when viewing any product from the product catalog. But it requires a robust, high-scalable product. - Exactly! Let's consider a case study of how to design it on a fast-code platform basis.

Fast Code Development: Calculator of Delivery Speed in Real-Time

As seen, enterprises need a solution that allows seeing the delivery time and cost while viewing specific product properties. The client turned to XME. with the same business issue. To increase conversion level and goods turnover, it was necessary to develop software that would:

• provide clients with a precise date and cost of delivery in real-time

• process a significant amount of requests at the same time

• work independently of the rest system to exclude the negative impact on the entire mechanism in the case of failure

There are many box solutions on the market to calculate delivery times. But none of them can work under conditions of permanent real-time load. Imagine that: Mike decided to buy a coffee maker. He opened our client's website catalog to look for the perfect purchase. Clicking on each new type of coffee maker, Mike compared how long it might take to deliver a coffee maker A, B, C, etc.

He did not have to choose the product he liked, click on the cart, and become upset that delivery would take too long. He could immediately analyze which option would be best for him. Now imagine that there are thousands of people like Mike: someone chooses a fridge, another one - a washing machine, and so on. The system would have to calculate the delivery time for each of the thousands of customers to satisfy them all.

An ordinary vendor solution cannot withstand such a high load. However, due to the fast code benefits, it took a few months of teamwork to develop custom software for these purposes.

The solution took a full development cycle. First, the team analyzed the client's needs and its current situation, then worked on the project map and solution architecture. The development, testing, and deployment phases followed this. Each milestone lasted several weeks. 4 specialists from the vendor's side took part in this project.

As a result, the customer received a robust, microservice-based solution. It is a separate module that can handle a huge number of delivery combinations and show it to buyers in real-time.

The product integrates seamlessly with:

• Warehouse management system. It's needed to get data about products in real-time

• Transport management system. To calculate the delivery time it is necessary to know all the transport routes of the company

• Third parties. The client involves delivery partners (DHL, Canada Post, etc.) in case of internal resources absence

So, based on the registered user’s location, the product enables calculation of the delivery time and methods for any item from the catalog. It allows choosing one from several variants. The system is highly scalable and can process over 10K orders per second.

Thus, the ability to provide buyers with all the data makes their choice final. In such a case, it does not require an additional system or employees' work. Besides, using such a real-time calculator, each company can boost the customer and user experiences because of convenience in service provision and openness towards clients.