Browse abandonment
Browse abandonment is when a shopper views products and leaves without adding anything to the cart. It happens many times more often than cart abandonment, and most of the shoppers who do it are anonymous, so most tools never reach them.
What it means
The browse abandoner has shown interest but not intent. A message to her works when it is specific (the products she viewed, the size she chose, the price change) and sparing. The hard part is not the message. It is knowing who she is: a browse-abandonment flow in an email tool only fires for shoppers the tool has already identified, which is a small share of the people who viewed the product.
Why it matters for a store
The gap is large. A womenswear brand on Shopify moved its abandoned-browse flow from its email tool to the agent and reached 3 times the shoppers on the same trigger, because the agent had a profile for visitors the email tool had never seen. On the same flow and the same store, revenue was 9.4 times higher in a matched month, as the case study on our site shows.
An example
A shopper views a coat three times in a week without adding it to the cart. The agent shows her the coat on the home page on her next visit and, once she has an email on file, sends one message when the coat goes on sale.
How the agent uses it
The sales agent acts on browse abandoners on the site, where no email is needed; retention messages the ones it can reach, with the viewed products inside.
Related terms
See also Abandoned cart, Anonymous visitor, Identity resolution.
See which of last week's visitors you missed
Thirty minutes, with your store and ad accounts open. Then 30 days free. A holdout group decides: if the agent doesn't add orders in 30 days, you don't pay.
Book 30 minutes
You'll talk to one of us.