I keep picking up half-filled carts in the aisles of my store…

What if you could bring back people to your store, after they have put items in their cart and then left leaving you high and dry? And what if you could also make them buy that second time around When customers put items in your cart then leave, at any step of the checkout process, we call that a "dropped" cart. Dropped carts can be a big problem on your store, and you can see in your .monitus.net account just how bad things are on your particular store. If you turn on the Cart Recovery tool in your account, you will see what would be considered dropped carts by our system. Now, that is all good and dandy, but what to do about them?

"You did not drop that cart…"

If you see a lot of dropped carts, or if most of your dropped carts contain big items, then that’s money left on the table… On the other side of a thick glass where you can’t get it. Our cart recovery service, allows you to automatically contact customers when they drop a cart. And that’s the beauty of it. What you tell them is up to you – but you could simply ask them if they needed more help, and offer your phone number or customer support email. Or you can be more aggressive and issue a one-time coupon to lure them back to their cart. Whatever you do, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll recover some of those carts – and some of anything is much better than none of anything… And since our service is on a pay-per-performance model, there’s really little risk for you. If a customer does not come back and convert, we both get nothing. You only pay us for customers who actually came back and converted through the email we sent them…

A’right – so what are all those shiny knobs and buttons, then, in the settings?

Glad you asked – wouldn’t have had anything to write about otherwise! So let’s quickly review the different settings:

• Dropped Carts Validity: What do you consider is absolutely necessary for a cart to be usable? Email is a no brainer. But maybe you want to contact people directly, by phone. Or use their name in your emails. Then you would check the "Consider name and phone" option. With that option switched on, carts are valid if they have an email address OR if they have both a name and phone number.
• Cart Recovery Delay: On the web, we can’t really officially say when a user is gone, hence we can’t say that a cart has been officially dropped. The way we do it is by looking at the last time the user interacted with your site, and then consider the user gone (and the cart dropped) when there’s been no activity on your store for a certain amount of time. This setting allows you to set how long that inactivity delay is for the dropped carts. Note that this has nothing do to with, and does not impact, the concept of "session" used by Google Analytics and such.
• Email to: We can email you every time a cart is dropped, if you check this option. The next option ("Email as Digest") then we send you a copy of the dropped carts once a day, at the end of the day. But they are treated as they come in nonetheless. If you are using the full service, you also get an option to receive the full cart content. ("Email Cart contents ")
• Turn off Monthly Archive Emails: We keep carts in our system for 60 days, so every month, we send you a backup of all carts older than 60 days, and then delete them from our system. If you check this option, you will not receive the backups – but the carts will still be deleted from our system though.
• IPs to ignore: Sometimes, you want carts form a particular IP to be ignored – maybe those are your phone sales reps or something. You can enter the IP addresses you want to ignore for Cart Recovery.
• Use Email service: This is the good stuff – and only available if you’ve signed-up for the full service. This is where you link our system with your email service provider, to send the actual emails to customers who have dropped a cart. Our preferred service is EmailLabs. We will set this all up for you when you sign-up. The following options ("Coupon Pool", "Cart Test Groups" and "Cart item HTML template") are all used to control additional information sent to your service for each dropped cart. Your service needs to support them, and so we will go over them with you as we set-up the full service for you.

I hope our little tour of the Cart Recovery service has convinced you just how powerful it is and I urge you to sign-up if you haven’t done so already!

Starting with version 2.3.1 of our tools, we are making a small library of javascript functions. The name of our library is MUI (or Monitus User Interface, but the acronym is so much sexier!) Now, one of the very cool feature of this library is that you finally can create your own Google Analytics (GA) trackers without running th erisk of polluting the cookie space. In other words, you can now create your own page tracking object that will be compatible with ours.

So how would one go about creating a tracking object ? Quite simply, you would put this line in the monitus_final_callback method:

var pageTracker = MUI.yahoo.create_ga_tracking_object('UA-xxxxxx-x');

And then you’d proceed using pageTracker just like you would normally do – calling trackPageView, etc…

My friends, this version is packed with new exciting features… I just have to share!

Google Analytics custom variables

So far, we have always required a second Google Analytics (GA) profile to track events. The reason behind this was that if you send an event on the landing page, GA sees the event as a second pageview. That means that if the user then navigates away, GA won’t see the visit as a bounced visit – as it should. And that would skew your bounce rate data in GA. Not good. The other way of doing things would have been to use custom variables – but there was not a lot of custom variable “slotS” available to us (5)… So with our tools sending data for all kinds of stuff, we’d have run out of slots pretty quickly. But now Google has announced they will increase the number of available custom variables so we are gladly jumping on board the variable boat! The downside is that your previous data in events will be cut-off from the data going forward in custom variables… But we are confident that is a very small cost to pay to go back to only one GA profile – always good to have everythign in one place. Now, don’t worry however: we won’t make that switch for you. Everyone will still use events (if they had provided a second profile) until you actualy tell us you are ready to switch to custom variables. You can do that directly in your Monitus.net account, in the Tools Settings.

Automated Google Analytics Custom Variables

• Organic Ranking Google’s organic ranking was previously tracked as an event – one of the possible bounce rate polluter… So now it’s a custom variable call.
• Repeat Buyers TWith a flip of a switch, get “New” and “Repeat” values in your custom variable slot.

New Automated Google Analytics Event

Tow new automatic events can now be trcked with the flip of a switch in your Monitus.net settings:

• Shipping Calculator usage This one will let you know as soon as someone uses you rshipping calculator on the checkout. It will include the zip code, the state and the shipping method the user selected… Could tell you you need to get a shipping deal for deliveries down south or something…
• Transaction ID On the confirmation page, if you turn this even ton in your account, we will send the transaction ID as an event – useful for cross-referencing in custom reports and such…

Checkout Form Validation

Our public javascript library adds a function to add validation to the checkout form(s) so that users are warned of incomplete fields before they submit the page… Thsi one is not a switch in your Monitus.net settings, you’ll need to contact us if you want it installed on your store.

And more!

We just felt so lightheaded by the whole giving new features process, we kept-on giving:

• Cart recovery now supports the new Yahoo! floating cart
• Target internationla customers in PersonQuest