Persistent Shopping, is now a well-known term in eCommerce and Marketplace. It is a great tool to avoid the worst scenario of eCommerce Storefront – ‘Abandoned Cart’.
If you are having an eCommerce Business, you must be monitoring the Abandoned Cart numbers and details. Magento being a great shopping cart platform provides a detailed Abandoned Cart report:
Through this report you can easily track the Customer Details and the products which they have added to the cart, but logged out or closed the Browser.
Being a business owner, you can send emails, some great discounted deals or similar offer to the Customer to influence them to revisit and checkout. But we can never know the reason for the Customer to left the shopping cycle. May be they added the Products to the shopping cart from Home, but while doing checkout from their Smartphone in car, they simply need to Login again which frustrated them, well there can be 100 guesses.
Prevention is better than cure
While it is not possible for the merchant to know the reason of ‘Abandoned Cart’, some precautions can be taken to reduce/avoid this scenario and the best option we get to Avoid ‘Abandoned Cart’ is through Persistent Shopping in Magento.
There are 2 ways through which Persistent Shopping feature works in Magento eCommerce Enterprise and Community Edition.
Fact: An important fact for Persistent Shopping is – Consumers now use multiple devices to access the Shopping Cart website, from home may be Desktop/Laptops, on the way in car through Smart Phones/Phablets and while in office mainly through Tablets.
Long Term Cookie
Once a customer logs in to a site, a long-term cookie is established for that browser/device combination. The customer is now able to view the contents of their shopping cart in subsequent sessions without logging in again.
How does it work?
Magento stores a long-term cookie in each browser (per device) once the customer logs in or creates an account using that browser. The long term cookie allows us to re-create some of the session the user had when they were logged in previously. It does not allow the customer or another user to access sensitive information. The user will not be able to complete the checkout process or access account information unless they are officially logged in.
Cross Browser Accessibility to Complete the Checkout Process
With persistent shopping cart, a customer can add a product to their shopping cart from one browser session at work, review his shopping cart and change the product configuration from his mobile device and then complete the transaction at home with another computer (session login required initially per browser/device combination to establish the long-term cookie). The persistent behavior feature reduces consumer frustration when they try to access their shopping cart from multiple browser sessions.
Persistent shopping cart is completely configurable by merchants, provides an additional way for the merchant to strengthen customer satisfaction and loyalty and helps increase conversion rates.
