Getting as much as possible of unfinished orders in osCommerce
Quite often the customers would register in osCommerce, go to the checkout pages, pass the Shipping page, Payment page, find themselves on the Order Confirmation page, and …. would not complete the purchase. Any Ecommerce web site suffers from this. And every online store should try to get maximum from unfinished orders.
First of all lets see what can be done to monitor what’s happening during the purchase process. When using tools like Google Analytics, its possible to set certain “goals”. A goal is a customer reaching certain page, sometimes also coming from other specified pages. So, applying to osCommerce, the goals can be defined as:
- Reaching the Shopping Cart page
- Reaching the Checkout Shipping page
- Reaching the Checkout Payment page
- Reaching the Checkout Confirmation page
- And finally - making the order, i.e. reaching the Checkout Success page
Some of our customers - osCommerce store owners - complain about the standard osCommerce Checkout process is a bit cumbersome. In such cases we recommend using our Easy Checkout module for osCommerce to simplify the checkout process, make it easier and less confusing for end customers.
But what if even a perfectly optimised osCommerce Checkout process fails and some customers still would not buy after reaching the Checkout Confirmation page? In such case we recommend getting as much of the situation as possible:
- we can create a report based on their shopping carts, or send an email notification to the store owner once there was an attempt to buy that has never succeeded
- we can send an automated email to the customer some days after the attempt and try to convince the customer to come back and buy
- we can send an automated email to the customer if we notice that the goods he or she wanted to order now cost less. So we compare the present day cost of the customer’s shopping cart / wish list with what the customer has in the cart, and if we see the price has dropped - we send an email to the client and tell him / her: “You thought about buying some products from our store, and it would cost you £2,000 in January 2007. But now we have special prices, and it would cost you only £1,850. So why not you come back and buy?”