Does your program use a perpetual shopping cart as part of it’s online registration process? It should. A perpetual shopping cart is one that follows the customer as the customer surfs your site. It’s done when your website puts a cookie on the user’s computer. If the customer leaves the site without finalizing the registration, but comes back in a day or two, the same shopping cart will be there.
Marketing Sherpa did a study that found 64% of those surveyed found a perpetual shopping cart to be an effective way of boosting sales.
Getting people to register while they’re on your site is important, because there is huge percentage of people who abandon shopping carts all together if they have a poor experience (especially if the site is too slow or if they are asked for too much information.)
Web researchers at Baymard Institute analyzed the results of 24 different studies on ecommerce abandonment and found the average rate of abandonment is 67.89%. Therefore, using a perpetual shopping cart is a good idea. It boosts the number of people who stay with the purchase process until completion – and for those who do abandon the cart, it’s still there when they return to your site.