How Multiplayer Shopping Is Redefining The Shopping Cart

Online businesses are constantly refining their online presence (with engaging onsite content, streamlined user journeys or otherwise) to remove their customers’ obstacles to conversion. However, with 75 percent of all online carts getting abandoned worldwide, the pain of losing customers at the final hurdle is one that’s felt by every online business.

Part of the issue is the restrictiveness of online shopping cart themselves because they generally can’t be shared; in essence, shopping carts are private to the person doing the shopping. This feature (or bug, depending on your perspective) means in-store experiences – like one person shopping and another person paying at the checkout – is an unwieldy and often impossible task that doesn’t translate to the online space.

To solve this issue, new players in the payments space like YouPay, a financial technology business based in Brisbane, Queensland, are making carts shareable to help online stores generate more sales through an all-new path to purchase.

What are the benefits of shareable shopping carts?

The concept of multiplayer shopping means online shopping carts can be created and shared by one person, and then viewed and paid for by another person.

This means that, beyond paying for yourself with available funds or pushing payments down the road with Buy Now Pay Later services, untethering shopping from payment gives shoppers an all-new, seamless path to purchase, which means more opportunities for customer engagement, cart creation and sales.

The market for third-party payments is apparent in acute scenarios like gift-giving (birthdays, anniversaries, holidays), professional purchases and charities, while it also lowers the bar for conversion on habitual purchases where one-person shops and another person pays.

Beyond someone else picking up the bill at the checkout, shareable carts allow your customers to share your products with friends, family and more directly, on social media and other online spaces.

Ultimately, by imbuing every cart that’s created with the potential to be shared with and paid for by a third party, online stores can empower their customers and grow their potential sales, customer acquisition and deepen customer insights in ways that have never previously been possible.

A case study of multiplayer shopping in action

The theoretical potential of multiplayer shopping – giving customers more ways to pay for their order and more reasons to shop at your store – is an enticing one, but can it reap results?

While cart-sharing technology like YouPay’s is in its infancy, online stores are already finding ways to convert more carts and enhance their brand presence by using it.

Australia’s largest online alternative fashion store, Beserk, launched with YouPay earlier this year, and has seen a significant spike in sales and customer acquisition:

1. 28 percent of all Beserk’s sales have come from YouPay orders (as of May 13, 2022)
2. 20 percent of all new customer acquisitions have come through YouPay (as of May 13, 2022)

For an established online business with a large customer base, these results demonstrate an understanding of and an appetite for the flexibility and functionality that cart sharing delivers to online shoppers.

What could this mean for your online business?

Multiplayer shopping gives shoppers, payers and merchants a way to socialise e-commerce to their own benefit. 

Shoppers can create carts with the exact items they want, payers can checkout with peace of mind and merchants can benefit from an empowered customer base that has more reasons to shop and more ways to pay.

With more businesses trying to bring the in-store experience online to enhance their brand and stay top-of-mind, the concept of making shopping carts collaborative is a natural extension of today’s interaction-heavy digital landscape. 

With this in mind, and seeing early results from cart sharing in existing online businesses, multiplayer shopping will continue to expand its reach and level of customer adoption.