Create scarcity on your cart page with an overlay

It is a well-known fact that scarcity (having less of something) increases the urge to buy. Nobody wants to miss out on getting something they want, and it doesn’t feel good when someone else gets it and you don’t.

It can happen very often that a visitor adds an item to the shopping cart/makes a reservation, but then changes his mind and decides to leave the page. A very effective idea to prevent this is to use a pop-up overlay to inform about the number of items left (e.g. “HURRY—only 3 left!”) on the shopping cart/reservation page.

This is how you can implement such an experiment:

Step 1. Create a new overlay

Select the ‘Overlay’ option on the left side menu.

Then press on the ‘Create an Overlay’ button:

Filter the available templates by selecting ‘Personalization’ and choose a template from the list (or, create your custom personalized one).

Then choose the On Exit trigger:

Step 2. Edit the template

Edit the text using the editing menu on the right side. In order to display the number of online visitors, select the option from the top menu and insert it into your text, like this:

Edit the overlay design using the menu options from the left side. For this example, I have edited the button link and the template name, but all the features are customizable.

Step 3. Set the audience and the segmentation

To set your audience, enter the URL of the page(s) where you want to trigger the experiment at “Manage the pages where you want to run this experiment”. For this example, make sure you enter the URL of the cart page.

Then create or select a segment:

After that, set up the device type segmentation and the frequency:

Step 4. Set the traffic allocation and goals

Move the blue slider to allocate and split the traffic between Control and Variation(s):

Then set up the goals that you want to track, either select from the list or create new ones:

When you click on the red button, this window will show up:

Step 5. Schedule and publish the overlay

The final step is to make the settings for the experiment scheduling and then you can set it live:

Finally, here’s how the pop-up will look:

DON’T FORGET: After each time you publish or update an experiment, you have to wait 3-4 minutes until it will be visible on your website. If you want to see the changes live instantly, install the OmniTool extension that helps bypass the cache system which generates the delay. You can download OmniTool here.