Track whether a product has been actively removed from the shopping cart

This article shows how you can track whether a user has actively removed a product from the shopping cart.

General Remarks

Mapp Intelligence provides four predefined statuses that can be passed for a product:

• Product viewed in list
• Product detail viewed
• Product added to the shopping cart
• Product purchased

Defining further statuses is not possible.
In this article, we show you how you can still track whether a product has been actively removed from the shopping cart.

Probably you already noticed that Mapp Intelligence provides the predefined figures "Qty Abandoned Products" and "Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate %". These relate to products that have been added to the shopping cart, but were not purchased within the same visit. In contrast, in this article we consider products that have actively been removed from the shopping cart, e.g., by clicking a "delete" button or icon:

Step 1: Adding an E-Commerce parameter

First, you have to create an E-Commerce parameter that is used to pass the status. For this purpose, click in Mapp Q3 on Configuration > Custom Parameters > E-Commerce Parameter > Create New Custom Parameter. Enter a meaningful title, e.g., "Qty Products removed from the shopping cart".

Please note that the aggregation Quantity and Sum creates two metrics:

As Datatype, we recommend "Figure".
The numerical value passed to Mapp counts how often the corresponding product has been removed.

Step 2: Passing the status

We have to distinguish two cases:

1. A product could have been removed completely from the shopping cart. In our shop, this would be possible by clicking on the trashcan or by changing the quantity to 0.
   
   
2. The product remains in the shopping cart, but its quantity is decreased (someone could, e.g., have put it three times in the shopping cart and removed it two times afterward).
   
   

For analysis, this differentiation will turn out to be very useful.

In both cases, the following information must be provided:

• Product name
  
• Product status "add"
  A status has to be passed to Mapp Intelligence (if no status is defined, Mapp uses "Product detail viewed").
  The product status "add" means that the product was added to the shopping cart.
  
• Qty products = 0
  "0" assures that the actual number of products put into the shopping cart is not falsified (if no quantity is passed, Mapp uses "1").
• E-Commerce parameter "Qty products removed from shopping cart"
  Case 1: If a product should be removed completely, the amount of the corresponding product in the shopping cart must be passed.
  Case 2: If the product should be removed partly, the amount of the product that has been removed must be passed.
• Page name = "Product completely removed" or "Product Qty Decreased"
  Information on a product must be submitted together with a page request. In order to differentiate between products that were completely removed and products for which the amount in the shopping cart was decreased, you should choose a unique name for the pages (e.g., "Product completely removed" or "Product Qty Decreased").

The exact function call depends on the chosen integration method. For technical details, please take a look at the development section.

Step 3: Analysis

To validate whether the tracking works correctly, we recommend comparing the number of products actively removed from the shopping cart with the number of products added to the shopping cart, the number of abandoned products, and the number of purchased products:

The following analysis shows which products were removed most often:

Useful custom figures

For a detailed analysis, we suggest creating the custom figures that we describe below.

Qty Products removed from shopping cart (decreased)

This custom metric counts the amount of a product that was removed from the shopping cart in case the product was not completely removed.

Qty Products removed from shopping cart (completely removed)

This custom metric counts the amount of a product that was removed from the shopping cart if the product was completely removed.

Products removed from shopping cart %

This custom formula shows the share of products that were actively removed from the shopping cart on the products that were added to the shopping cart.

The figures created may now be added to the dimension "Products":