Don't Enhance My Shopping Cart Now!

Muckety Muck Electronics, Inc. (MME) was running a discount Internet shopping website for electronic components. MME had a policy of not publishing the prices of their merchandise until the merchandise were added to the shopping cart. The marketing department of MME had found that the rate of impulse buy on their website was quite low. Several of their online customers on their first visit added components of interest to their cart to check the prices and then left the website. However, the return rate of such first time visitors was above 37% and almost 70% of them were making a purchase on their return visit.

The shopping cart of MME was initially designed in such a way that it automatically emptied all its contents at the end of the day. Since search for electronic components with close tolerances was time consuming, the marketing department estimated that if shopping carts were able to retain contents between visits, then sales were likely to increase by at least 5%.

A project was immediately initiated to retain merchandise in the shopping carts. Since MME had to meet challenging financial targets, a tight time-line was implemented. The programmers modified the shopping cart program. Half-way through the project, the procurement department communicated that the inventory and the cost of procurement was changing on a daily basis, therefore the availability and prices of shopping cart contents had to be updated too. This was included as a new requirement and all the testing scripts had to be revised. The impact on the time-line was avoided by having the project team work through the weekend.

Finally, updated shopping carts were released in production. Two months later, sales from return visits were down by 7%. A root cause analysis revealed that the website “listing” module was originally programmed to display only those items that were best bargains based on daily comparative pricing feed. Any item that was not a bargain was not listed. This strategy was decided by the founders. However, when the items were retained in the shopping cart, they often lost their bargain status. They were not listed but still retained in the shopping carts with updated prices. This disappointed the returning visitors, who left disgusting comments on the discussion boards.

I have a list of two dozen questions related to the issues and problems in this business case. This is a real business case but I've changed the industry and the situation to protect business privacy.