On today's episode, we discuss takeaways from the 2022 Winter Olympics, video length, impulse buys declining, whether the streaming wars can be won, delivery culture, an unpopular opinion about cart abandonment, where escalators came from, and more. Tune in to the discussion with our analysts Suzy Davidkhanian, Dave Frankland, and Paul Verna.

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.

As digital transformation accelerates worldwide, growth in online shopping has created opportunities not only to reimagine brand relevance, but also to rethink the end-to-end customer experience. Dr. Tiffany Raymond, head of global customer advocacy, at PayPal, talks with eMarketer editorial director at Insider Intelligence Rimma Kats, about steps you can take to optimize your product, cart and checkout pages to help reduce cart abandonment, improve conversion, increase spend and boost customer loyalty.

eMarketer principal analyst Mark Dolliver, junior analyst Blake Droesch, and vice president of content studio at Insider Intelligence Paul Verna discuss whether WarnerMedia just killed movie theaters, why Salesforce is buying Slack, why Facebook's buying Kustomer, the first few cases of Facebook's Oversight Board, Nielsen readies to change its TV ratings, shopping carts on WhatsApp, how much cash can fit in your pocket at once, and more.

The average conversion rate for campaign emails was 6.5%, lower than that of browse abandonment (7.6%), post-purchase (15.4%), product abandonment (17.3%), and cart abandonment messages (37.5%).

Online, these services pop up at checkout and can help reduce cart abandonment, though their appeal may not translate to brick-and-mortar stores in the same manner. Demand for cryptocurrency as a payment method was muted. Only 6% of survey respondents rated the ability to use crypto for apparel purchases as “extremely valuable.”

"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.

Amazon Pay’s seamless one-click checkout reduces shopper friction, thereby improving convenience, cutting into cart abandonment, and growing sales. It can make payments a nonissue for users—allowing Amazon to emphasize other parts of its growth strategy—while also tightening relationships with customers even when they aren’t shopping with Amazon.

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.