Improve conversions by using exit-intent pop-ups to displaying cart items and their limited availability

Summary

Shopping cart abandonment is a major headache for most eCommerce stores, with a significant impact on revenue. While there are many tactics to retarget users after they leave the site, there is a lack of tactics to convince users to complete the purchase while they are on the site.

We introduced an exit-intent pop-up that displays potentially abandoned products in the cart when users are about to leave the site, convincing them to complete the purchase in the current session. The result: a 7% increase in conversion rate and a 4% increase in ARPU.

Overview

Eldorado.ua is one of the largest online electronics stores in Eastern Europe (2 million visits per month according to SimilarWeb).

Our task was to increase revenue per user (ARPU) by optimizing the UX to increase conversion rate (CR) and average order value (AOV).

Research

Analysis of the conversion funnel revealed that a large proportion of users were dropping off between adding a product to the cart and completing the purchase. We identified the specific friction points that users experience in the shopping cart and checkout. One of these was a natural tendency to check if the product added to the cart could be found cheaper elsewhere.

We found that some users would go to other sites to look for better deals on the products they added to the cart, and some would never come back even if they didn’t find a better deal. So we needed to find a way to encourage users to complete the transaction before they start looking elsewhere.

We also found that Eldorado.ua had a significant selection of products that were in short supply. So we decided to effectively inform users about the scarcity of products in their shopping carts to convince them to complete the purchase in the current session.

Hypothesis

We reasoned that communicating to users that products added to the shopping cart are in short supply and may not be available for purchase later if the transaction is not completed in the current session would reduce shopping cart abandonment.

The trick was to trigger this communication when there was a credible indication that users were about to abandon the cart.

Solution

To manifest our hypothesis, we decided to test an exit-intent pop-up that displays the potentially abandoned products in the cart and messages that communicate the scarcity of the products in the cart.

The pop-up is activated when a user moves the mouse cursor outside the browser window, provided that the user has added at least one product to the cart in the current session.

The control variant required changes to the UX.

Validation of the hypothesis

To validate this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment to measure the impact of the new exit-intent pop-up UX on CR, AOV and ultimately ARPU. The experiment had the following characteristics:

Type of experiment:

A/B test

Traffic split: 50/50

Device: Desktop

Primary metric: ARPU

Secondary metrics: AOV and CR

Participants in the experiment: 93,248 users

Conversions recorded during the trial: 4,219.

Results

The alternative variant, with an exit-intent pop-up showing the potentially abandoned products in the cart and messages communicating the scarcity of products added to the cart, generated a 4% increase in ARPU and a 7% increase in CR. In fact, users who added products to their cart and saw the exit-intent pop-up (alternative variation) had a CR 2.5 times higher than users who added products but didn't see the exit-intent pop-up (control variation). In addition, users who received the exit-intent pop-up and clicked on the "Confirm Purchase" CTA in the pop-up had a CR of over 50%! This result indicates that our scarcity messages were effective in convincing users to complete the purchase in the current session. The result of the experiment achieved 95% statistical significance and 80% power.