eMarketer recently spoke with Vadim Grinberg, vice president of consumer growth and insight at Dagne Dover, to discuss what the retailer has learned since opening up its pop-up location and how it feels about retail tech and handles cart abandonment.

On Cyber Monday, social referral traffic had a 2% conversion rate and 94% cart abandonment rate, compared with a 12% conversion rate and 80% cart abandonment rate for search traffic. Across the key shopping holidays, social shoppers generated a single-digit share of traffic and an even lower share of orders, while search shoppers generated similar traffic but a disproportionately high share of orders.

Amazon’s introduction of one-click ordering to alleviate shopping cart abandonment made online buying so easy it became habit. But that habit didn’t translate especially well to mobile, as page latency and difficult checkouts once again plagued conversions in this new context.

"This has resulted in increased cart abandonment, as buyers are seeing higher prices at checkout and are purchasing less," she said. eBay will continue to feel the effects as more states implement the internet sales tax laws, at least for H1 2020. But its challenges extend beyond just internet sales tax.

The conversational commerce channel has helped the company with an issue troubling nearly all retailers—cart abandonment. “On mobile, you're so much more distracted,” Egan said. “We're trying to test that window that people find as a helpful reminder vs. something that’s annoying. We only send one cart abandonment message, and we’re testing when that should be sent—an hour after? Is it 24 hours?

Capitalizing on Cart Abandonment. The overwhelming majority of online shopping carts are abandoned, so cart abandonment messaging is a must for retailers. However, only 50% of the 250 brands send cart abandonment messages, and even fewer capitalize on them. Just 24% of retailers include additional personalized recommendations in their cart abandonment messaging.

Of the 250 retailers ranked, 50% send abandoned cart emails and 24% include personalized product recommendations within those messages. Among the top 25, 84% sent cart abandonment emails and 68% made additional personalized product recommendations within them, underlining the missed opportunity there. Who were the top performers and what else set them apart?

Email automation prompted by abandonment of a specific product or an entire cart, and even by website browsing, is viewed by recipients as highly relevant compared with batch-and-blast campaigns. Hashemi has found that for Uncommon Goods, category affinity is not as strong as it is for most retailers.