Add to cart
Fast track (Summarised definition)
Add-to-cart refers to the e-commerce action where customers select products for potential purchase by placing them into their virtual shopping cart. This critical conversion point indicates genuine customer interest and purchase intent, making it a valuable metric for retailers to track, optimise remarketing strategies, and assess campaign effectiveness in driving conversions.
Full lap (Full definition)
Add to cart refers to the fundamental e-commerce action where customers select products for potential purchase by placing them into their virtual shopping cart. In marketing contexts, this represents a critical conversion point that indicates genuine customer interest and purchase intent, making it one of the most valuable metrics for online retailers to track and optimise.
From a marketing perspective, add-to-cart events serve as powerful indicators of campaign effectiveness and user engagement. This metric plays a crucial role in assessing user intent, product interest, and the effectiveness of various marketing efforts in driving conversions. Digital marketers analyse ATC rates across different traffic sources, advertising campaigns, and product categories to identify which strategies successfully move customers through the purchase funnel.
The metric proves particularly valuable for conversion rate optimisation, as it highlights where customers demonstrate buying intent before potentially abandoning their carts. By analysing ATC-to-purchase conversion rates and identifying friction points in the checkout process, marketers can implement strategies such as streamlined checkout flows, guest checkout options, and trust signals (e.g., secure payment icons) to reduce cart abandonment rates and improve overall conversion rates.
Add-to-cart data enables sophisticated remarketing strategies, allowing businesses to retarget users who showed purchase intent but didn't complete transactions. This behavioural signal triggers automated email sequences, personalised advertisements, and special offers designed to recapture lost sales.
Additionally, ATC metrics inform inventory management, product positioning, and pricing strategies. High add-to-cart rates combined with low purchase completion may indicate pricing concerns or checkout friction, whilst low ATC rates might suggest product presentation issues or poor traffic quality.
For eCommerce businesses, understanding add-to-cart behaviour helps optimise the customer journey, improve marketing ROI, and ultimately drive revenue growth through data-driven decision making.