Shopify Plus Hack That Saved Us Over $32k & Boosted CVR To 5.87%

Anyone that owns or runs an eCommerce store can understand just how frustrating it can be to look at your abandoned cart rates. Having automation in place to minimize your abandoned carts is critical to lowering your CPA if you’re running high budget cold traffic campaigns.

After running a multi million dollar store for the past year or two, I have implemented multiple automations (SMS, Email, Push notifications, etc.) into our tech stack to drop the number as much as possible.

This year in November of 2020, I went a little further by piecing together a few apps for a hack that helped us convert cold traffic FB campaigns at over 10%, and save over $32,000 in abandoned carts for first time visitors specifically.

If you want to lower CPA’s and convert higher, especially on your cold traffic campaigns, follow along and implement this Shopify Plus trick to get some awesome results for your brand.

Here’s What You Need To Implement This Hack:

Privy Pop Up App (or any other exit intent app that allows for conditional logic triggers)
Order Limits by MinMaxify
MetaFields Guru App (or any metafield editing app)
A product that’s low cost and lightweight (depends on your AOV, LTV, etc.)

How The Trick Works

Ok, so now that you know what you need, I’ll explain how the hack works.

Essentially it’s an exit intent popup that adds a free gift to users’ carts if they have a cart value over X amount AND are a first time visitor to your store.

This can definitely be used for non-Shopify Plus stores as a general exit intent hack, but our users typically add an average of four different products to the cart and we don’t want to give a free gift to everyone.

If you have a regular Shopify store and users typically checkout with one product in their cart, or you’re sending to a custom landing page with one product or bundle this will work just fine for you.

With the Privy trigger only showing to first time visitors it will allow you to save a ton of cart abandons and boost your revenue considerably.

So, each time a new user has something in their cart, this trick will show an exit intent popup telling them that if they complete their order in the next 5, 10, 15 minutes they’ll receive a free gift. This is how we have our triggers set for first time visitors to our store:

Cart Value Under $35 = No Gift

Cart Value Over $35 & Under $100 = Free Lip Scrub

Cart Value Over $100 = Free 8oz Body Scrub

We’ll use the Order Limits app to ensure users don’t add more than 1 free gift by going back to their cart page and editing the quantity, and we’ll use the Meta Fields Guru app to hide the product from the store search feature.

Of course there have been people that have gone back after getting the free gift added to their cart and deleted items to get below the $35 threshold, but in those cases we simply don’t ship the free gift.

You can tell your shipping team to only add the free gift to the order if it meets the $35 order value level, and make it clear in the popup that ONLY orders over $35 will be eligible.

Setting Up the Exit Intent Hack

Step One: Free Product Creation & Variant ID

First, you’ll need to create a product in your store that is ONLY available in the Online Store channel, with a price of $0.00. You’ll also want to have FREE somewhere in the name if you quickly want to check in on your order interface to follow along with orders to see that it’s working at a glance.

Ideally this product should be three things:

Low Cost

Low Weight

Small

You’ll have to figure out what’s best for your brand. For us it’s a 2oz vegan lip scrub.

Once you have created your free product in Shopify, we’re going to find the Variant ID number. We’ll use this later to create a cart addition URL to add to the popup.

View the product page of the product page you just created and add .xml to the end of the url.

Example: https://nectarusa.com/products/free-strawberry-lip-scrub

Turns into: https://nectarusa.com/products/free-strawberry-lip-scrub.xml

Hit enter and a page with a bunch of HTML code will appear.

Look for the block of code with the <variant> tag and look for this specific line of code: <id type=”integer“>31816075346000</id>

You’re going to copy the number between the brackets, this is your product’s “Variant ID”. Save this number somewhere to use lateer.

Step Two: Hiding The Product From Search

Now that you have your Variant ID saved, we’re going to hide the product from being visible in your store. We don’t want a $0.00 product popping up in search now do we?

For this, we’ll open Meta Fields Guru from the product page. Just click more actions in the upper right hand corner and click on “Edit Metafields”.

Once you’re in the editor, you’re going to create a new metafield with these values:

Key: hidden

Namespace: seo

Integer: 1

Save this metafield and go back to your store in incognito mode to see if when you search the product name the product appears. It should not be visible anywhere in your store.

Step Three: Setting a Maximum in Order Limits App

Now that you’ve created your free product, gotten the Variant ID number and hidden the product from your store you’re going to set a maximum on this product to keep shady customers from being able to add more than just one free gift from their cart.

Head over to the Order Limits app and click on the “Product” tab at the top of the screen.

Click on the “Add Product” button and select your free product from the list.

Once you have selected the product, add a value of 1 to the “Max” field then click the “Publish Limits” button in the upper right hand corner. You must hit Publish Limits or it will not take effect.

You will also want to go over to the “Advanced” tab and check the “Prevent Checkout After Quantity Change” box to ensure the checkout button is disabled if they attempt to increase the quantity of the free gift in their cart.

Once you have completed these steps, the small amount of people that will try to game the system by going back to their cart and increasing the free gift quantity will be met with a message saying they can’t have more than 1 of that item in their cart, and the checkout will be blocked until they bring the number back down to 1.

Step Four: Setting Up Your Privy Popup & Trigger

Ok, we’re almost done. Next, open Privy or your popup app that allows for conditional logic triggers and exit intent popups.

Build the popup or have your designer do it and leave a space for a button to be added to the graphic. We’re going to build a cart addition hyperlink to place in the button so when a user clicks it, it automatically adds your free gift to their cart. Here is the URL structure:

https://yourdomain.com/cart/add?id=31816075346000&quantity=1

Here is where you paste the “Variant ID” that you saved earlier in the URL above.

When finished it should look something like this:

https://nectarusa.com/cart/add?id=31816075346000&quantity=1

Now that you have your finished URL, you’re going to paste it into the button field so that button on the popup is clickable. Make sure to have some text stating that it A) Is only valid on orders over your threshold and B) Expires in 10-15 minutes to create some urgency.

Now that you have your popup ready and saved, we’re going to build out the trigger, so it only shows to new visitors that have a sufficient cart value.

Your conditional trigger setting for this popup should be as follows:

Property: Cart Value

Operator: Greater Than

Value: 35 (or whatever you want this threshold to be)

AND

Property: Cart Value

Operator: less_than

Value: 100

AND

Match ANY:

Property: Order Count

Operator: less_than

Number Value: 1

Property: User Identity

Operator: is_not_known

AND

Property: Current URL

Operator: contains

Value: checkout

The last part is a page level trigger that us Shopify Plus users can use if we have Privy code added to the checkout.liquid code. If you don’t have Shopify Plus and want to use this exit intent trick you can leave the page level trigger out of it.

If this is confusing, just watch the video I made when I go over the logic to see how it’s built visually. Below is the picture of the condensed trigger rules for the free gift popup.

You're Done!

Now you have everything setup to start saving thousands of dollars in abandoned checkouts!

Always make sure to test this in incognito mode in your browser to make sure everything works as it should. Just add products until your cart value reaches the threshold you set, go to the checkout page, then attempt to leave the checkout page.

You’ll be met with your popup telling you to add the free gift and complete your order in the next 15 minutes.

Now, you WILL get people that go back and drop their cart value under the threshold, but since you’ve added eligibility requirements to the popup, you can simply tell your shipping team to simply not fulfill the free gift if they haven’t hit the required cart value.

This hack is especially useful for those of you that are running a lot of cold traffic, because it will help lower your customer acquisition costs and get you a better ROAS. You’ll see that we had over a 10% conversion rate in November on our FB ads, with most of that spend dedicated to our cold traffic campaigns.

If you have any questions about the setup, feel free to send me a message at colin@sociallaunch.co

Also, if you want to snatch up some incredible backlinks while COVID-19 is still in full swing, check out my COVID SEO Hack. These opportunities won’t be here for long so create your code and start pushing out emails!

If you’re looking to capitalize on the need for face masks, while increasing AOV, reducing abandonment and getting daily brand awareness you should be selling branded face masks. Check out our bulk face masks here.