A persistent sales assistant can be effective, when it comes to that moment of wavering – should I, shouldn’t I, buy this particular piece of tat? “Oh, but it’ll look wonderful in your house / car / cocktail glass – go on, we’ve only got a couple left at this very special price.”
That’s one thing. Then you leave the shop with or without your tat, and resolve to avoid said assistant like the plague in future. That would never happen on the internet, would it? Apparently it can. A new service called Abandonment Tracker Pro monitors those products that shoppers drop from their baskets before checkout – then follow them with messages asking if they’d like to reconsider said abandoned purchases. Is this the sort of intrusive activity that could put a dent in internet commerce? It’s in the same ballpark as the personalised advertising that irritated so many Facebook users. Surely what many shoppers value on the web is the sense of detachment from the misery of the actual process. It’s also a step removed from using your card in a store, which is a step again from the use of cash.
A pessimist might imagine that such methods will continue to encroach on the virtual experience until it becomes only marginally less painful than finding an actual shop. An optimist would hope that stores employing this type of finger-poking pester would buckle under complaints from customers.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 