Most people who have been working on any eCommerce platform (Volusion included) for any length of time have grown used to the idea that there are limitations to every shopping cart; limitations that you just have to live with. We hate that kind of thinking. We prefer to believe that anything is possible and we’re rarely proven wrong.
If you’ve looked around our site at all, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen our library of Volusion software applications and plugins, but what you may not have understood completely is that many of those applications were developed as a direct result of customer requests. You can read one of our development tales after the jump…
StuffedAnimals.com (a longtime customer) is a multi-million dollar business and when you get that big, you have the time and resources to examine your business on every level, which is just what they had been doing when they discovered that they had a high number of abandoned carts each month. Every one of those full, but dormant carts represented a missed opportunity for conversion. It’s sad enough to think of all of those stuffed bunnies and kittens abandoned in the cold, infinite dark of cyberspace, but the lost revenue was too much to bear (*insert your own teddy bear pun here).
To combat the problem, StuffedAnimals.com began to send follow-up emails to the customers who had abandoned their carts. The process was time consuming, as it involved logging into the Volusion admin screen, isolating the abandoned carts, then determining which of those were connected with a registered customer, then manually sending that customer an email suggesting that they complete the purchase (enticing them with a discounted purchase price). The results were significant, but so was the effort to achieve them. That’s where we came in.
After being made aware of the problem and the potential revenue available, we immediately set about developing an automated solution. Approximately 20 gallons of coffee and hundreds of lines of code later, The Voloomerang was born. An elegant solution, The Voloomerang offers eMerchants the opportunity to craft a message they believe will entice their wandering customers to return and complete their purchase. This message is then sent automatically (using data gathered directly from the Volusion admin) to the potential customer and the results can often be dramatic. StuffedAnimals.com reported to us that they had seen returns as high as 35%!
So what does this mean to you? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for The Voloomerang right now and start reaping the benefits immediately, but that’s not really the point of this post. The point of this post is: if you have a very specific need that falls outside of Volusion’s capabilities, if you have a problem that needs solving, call Brand Labs. We’re like The A-Team of Volusion-related needs… so we’re like The V-Team and we’re ready to kick your problem’s ass.
