"Cart abandonment" recovery process?

In the marketing world, cart abandonment is a reality and some business oriented people will look into those and possibly contact the potential customer with either an email checking if they ran into a technical problem, or a special deal for them to come back.

I know s2M is not set up like that out of the box, but i was thinking of ways to do it with what we have but i am not sure it is completely working (i didn`t try, i am still in the thinking mode).

Is there a way to have this sequence of steps:
– customer sees a sale pitch or a membership option
– customer clicks on a “buy now” button of some kind
– customer would be brought to a page (or see something appear out of a magician’s hat) where the customer would have to enter his/her name and email
– customer would click NEXT
– customer would either be sent to Paypal or to a Pro-form

That would need to be done as smoothly and seaminglessly as possible so entering the name and email (if not logged in) would be seen as just “part of the process”, like creating an account.
Then, it would be ideal to know what WAS in the cart (although it is not technically a cart, but what “product” was listed on the button).

This kind of set up, if it can be done as a workaround or integrated into future upgrades of s2M, would have a few advantages to the users:
– if a purchase is abandonned before completion, the admin might tally what products seem to cause abandonment
– if a purchase is abandonned, the admin can possibly contact the customer to check if there was a technical problem, or other issues that might direct the admin to make some changes
– if a purchase is abandonned, the customer might be sent a special email about either a related product, something less expensive (if admin suspect the price was an issue), additional valuable content (to build trust), or a special offer like a discount or other.

So two questions here:
– is there a current known workaround to accomplish this?
– if not, is it possible to suggest that as an additional feature for future versions of s2M
– if none of the above, please let me know so i can give a call to my programmer

Thank you for your inquiry.

The only way I see this being possible currently is to either create your own form that grants access to the checkout form after the User fills out their email address, or to have Users sign up with Free Registration Pro forms before they can check out (in this case you’d want to send a newsletter out to Users that are s2Member Level 0 every so often).

I don’t see this being added to s2Member anytime soon, but I’ll put in a request for this.