This is a guest post by Heather Dawson of Runa. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Miva Merchant.
This is the time of year that retailers are getting ready for the big holiday rush and articles pop up with sales predictions and ideas on how to get ready for the holidays. Analysts are predicting large growth (16%) in online sales this quarter when compared to last year. The online outlook is much rosier than overall retail outlook which is projected to have a modest 3.2% year over year growth this quarter.
The bottom line is that shoppers are increasingly moving online to do their comparison-shopping and that means more traffic to your site. It also means more abandonment as shoppers move to other sites to compare your product and prices with similar items from other sites. There are articles are filled with classic advice on things you can do to reduce abandonment like offering free shipping, or using your email outreach or retargeting advertising to try and entice the customer to come back when they are ready. What you aren’t going to see in the general articles is Miva Merchant’s unique way of presenting offers to abandoners to encourage them to stay and buy.
That’s what strategic partner Runa offers to the Miva Merchant community. Over the past year Runa has helped over 100 Miva Merchants turn abandoning shoppers into incremental sales. Runa is a combination service that has both powerful analytics that detect abandoners, and an offer presentment capability that delivers offers in real-time to abandoners before they leave your site. The end result is incremental sales from shoppers who weren’t going to buy.
Runa has recently released some Miva Merchant integration enhancements allowing merchants to be very specific in how promotions are offered. For example, you may not want a regular customer to receive an offer when they abandon your site as you know that they will come back, but a shopper who has never purchased before would be a good target for an offer for you. You may also want to turn off any promotions if the shopper is a wholesale buyer or has another discount, like a coupon. You now have the ability to turn off Runa promotions when there is another price discount offered.
You can read more about other Miva Merchant’s experience with Runa by clicking here.
